Edward H. Binns, retired MBA/CPA, organized this blog to discuss quiddity as it relates to our daily lives. Founder of the Urban Coyotes mentoring seminars, which deal explicitly with ethical survival, this blog is closed to entries but remains available for comments. NEW TO THIS BLOG? Please go to the August, 2010 postings and read the 149 postings in order! Current news posts are in the DAILY QUIDDITY blog (link on right hand margin).

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Liberals – Philosophy XVI blog 122

Below is a very long blog thread of 143 statements from 2007 without edits – there are two sentences which I have boldfaced in red because they represent the fundamental lesson I took from this discussion. I know this is long. Please read it. These are very educated and specialized minds that are quarrelling and nit-picking in a startlingly immature way – because – they are defending their civil religion. Making and responding to these entries started me on the road to unmasking the civil religion of modern liberalism (see the footnote in blue at the bottom of this post).

An Extensive Blog Thread about Hitler as a Socialist

URBAN COYOTE May 8, 2007, 3:55pm Hitler was a left-winger, a progressive who brought "National Socialism" to Germany. He wasn't right wing at all, in fact, for a considerable time he was an ally of Stalin. There was jubilation in Moscow when Paris fell to the Nazis.

Right-wingers don't believe in deifying "the people." The sole (typically God-ordained) authority owns everything. Tsarist Russia, the Empire of Japan (especially under Tojo) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are rather good examples of right-wing government. So was Salazar in Portugal. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Peron were all leftists, saying over and over and over that what they were doing was for the people.

What college teaches the logic that a citizen, walking into a store and buying tasty, addictive cigarettes that increase the likelihood of cancer, is the same thing as being sent to a gulag, mental hospital or death camp for having a counter-revolutionary attitude? An argument using the technique of "inference by analogy" is sound only when the analogy fits.

Apparently, merely having a large GDP is inherently evil?

"Can we just say that we have too much power and don't need to develop intelligence these days? We're still nice people if the Pakis and Indians exchange nukes. So what if Tokyo gets vaporized because North Korea is jealous of the G7. It doesn't matter to us if the Iranians smuggle a nuke into Tel Aviv and pickle it off. Right? Huh? Accurate intelligence is just an arrogant luxury of colonialist power-trippersâ€¦ " I wrote this and got no answer from Jesurgislac.

Maybe we need better intelligence so we can make the RIGHT decisions. What do you think of that? Good intelligence would have kept us out of the Bay o Pigs, out of Vietnam, out of Beirut in the 1980's, out of Iraq I i 1991, for example. Good intelligence could have gotten us INTO the Saarland in 1936 to stop Hitler when he was still a bluffing banty rooster and thus save 50 million lives. My contention that intelligence is a vital and civilized function has wholly and entirely unrebutted — silence implies acquiescence â€“ so I win the discussion here on how to deal with our proliferating world, which is start by insisting on better intelligence.

Hilzoy doesn't want to get into a discussion that rots into a comparative body count, but you're almost stuck with that in dealing with a savage philosophy like communism. East German border guards had standing orders to shoot anyone trying to escape to the west. Anyone, including children. The border guards were posted together. If the other guard won't shoot a child, the order was to shoot the guard who was too priggish to kill! Think about that mindset. In the late 1970's, the Soviet's deputy UN ambassador, Arkady Shevchenko, defected to the west and was placed in a safehouse in northern Virginia where he was debriefed. After a couple of days, he called the Soviet's UN office in New York to find out what had happened to his family in Moscow. They'd been killed by "Security" to keep everyone else in line. A really good book about how this works is "Beyond All Hope" by Armando Valladares, a Cuban locked up for decades because of the nameplate on his desk.

Communism, being a strong form of dictatorship and constantly warring against the minds of its citizens, is inherently anathema to decency and human rights.

The moral torpor of the West is of an entirely different nature â€“ a weakness for graft rather than systemic inhumanity. Every American president from Woodrow Wilson onward has colluded with central and South American dictators; only the democratization of the region in the last 20 years has dried up some of that swamp, finally. Nigeria got a lot of money selling oil in the 1960's. They used that income to commit genocide on their minority Ebo population, a horror condoned by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and US President Lyndon Johnson. The Ebos were wiped out with US and UK weapons and planes. Hippies demonstrating for peace and love weren't interested in this boring situation. Neither were American civil rights activists. A young congressman, "Buzz" Lukens (R-OH), came to my campus and tried to stir us up about this genocide. One thing he said particularly struck me. When he returned from his "tour" of Nigeria, he got off the plane near DC and was immediately mobbed by CIA people with notebooks. What was going on? What had he seen? They didn't have anyone on the ground, they were blind to the situation.

That's why Reagan signed off on those dirty tricks in central America. It was American foreign policy SOP. It'd been done for decades. People he respected, like Casey, urged it. It was part of "containing communism," although that's an absurd argument â€“ it's part of colluding with oppression, which is exactly how Castro came to power in Cuba! BTW, our intelligence was already so bad, even in the 1950's, that Castro, educated in New York city at Columbia, was regarded initially as a potential USA ally, even into 1959 after he took power.

Graft like this continues today, but except for the intentionally interminable civil war in Columbia, it takes a different and less bloody form, largely thanks to the courage and integrity of Latin American themselves in improving their own forms of government. Bill Clinton wound up serving his donors from Indonesia and China (rather than the survivors of Tiennamen Square who were on the rostrum with him when he was nominated in 1992). Things haven't gotten cleaner: the money behind "W" is a witches brew of gun runners, drug wholesalers, energy industry friends (remember Enron?) and a line of credit from the banker who also serves the bin Laden family.

In 2004, the Democrats reduced some of this corruption because, though a lot of money was needed to compete with the bankroll behind "W," the spouse of the nominee inherited an on-going fortune in factories that produce pickled condiments as well as ketchup.

Ketchup has been classified as a vegetable, you know.

john miller

Posted May 8, 2007 at 4:28 pm

By Reagan, you know.

UC, nobody here has ever questioned the value of good intelligence gathering and the need for it in this world, so I don’t know what you think you have won since you weren’t competing with anybody.

Gathering intelligence is only part of the issue, however. A larger part, IMO, is how the intelligence is interpreted, and what action follows from that. You made a lot of assumptions about what would or would not have happened with adequate intelligence. But that is all they are, assumptions. Specially, since at best, a lot of intelligence gathering still requires guess work about the mindsets of those on the other side.

Also, nobody has stated at anytime that the oppressive regimes of Stalin, Mao and others have not killed a lot of people. Hilzoy and others have just chosen not to get into a debate about numbers, which is hardly a dismissal of the issue.

You have a lot of knowledge and you impart it, but sometimes with a very superior attitude and condescension. It would be nice if you just lowered the level a little.

hairshirthedonist

Posted May 8, 2007 at 4:42 pm

What I see as being more problematic than superior attitude and condescension is the sense of mania I get when reading your writings, uc. I’m not trying to be insulting, just honest. It’s really not even problematic for me. It’s a little exhilarating, really, for me. I could see it being a problem for most other readers.

Posted May 8, 2007 at 5:13 pm

All I know is that I’m getting out of here before Gary wanders by :)

Anarch

Posted May 8, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Hitler was a left-winger, a progressive who brought "National Socialism" to Germany. He wasn't right wing at all, in fact, for a considerable time he was an ally of Stalin. There was jubilation in Moscow when Paris fell to the Nazis… Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Peron were all leftists, saying over and over and over that what they were doing was for the people.

Oh. My. God.

I can’t speak to your professional capacity, but for the love of God learn some history before you comment again.

Mattbastard

Posted May 8, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Hitler was a left-winger, a progressive who brought "National Socialism" to Germany. He wasn't right wing at all… .

Yeah, and Thatcher was an anarchist.

Keeh-rist.

Paging dr ngo…

Hartmut

Posted May 8, 2007 at 5:39 pm |

The main authors of the Black Book were not just left but (former) communists themselves (and not in the way that neocons are ex-left).

There is also a black book of capitalism but to my knowledge it is several levels below in quality.

There is also now a second part of the BBoCom (I own it but have not read it yet)

Oddly enough, I didn’t say that Hitler was on the right, just that he was anti-Communist. I am aware that there is a sort of tenuous ancestral link between him and one school of earlier socialists. Similarly, links between him and a lot of reactionaries. I don’t see much value in trying to place him on a spectrum I don’t much care for anyways, but fwiw, I’d place him on the right.

And, speaking of genocide, Slacktivist linked to the Eight Stages of Genocide and pointed out that all eight have already begun in Iraq.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 8, 2007 at 8:41 pm

DJ: I disagree. I think that after the barracks bombing, we should have bombed terrorist training camps in the Beka’a valley. There were a number of them, and their locations were fairly well known.

Assuming one could hit those targets without killing civilians, fine. Though I think it was the US that took the first shots. We were taking sides in someone else’s civil war and that’s what triggered the attack on the US. That deserves a mention, I think.

More importantly, I think it’s odd that the car bomb attack mentioned in one of your links (”countermanded”) though not in your post seems to get so little attention. Your post is not the first time I’ve seen people on the left criticize Reagan for cutting and running from Lebanon and it has always annoyed me, because it plays to the national hypocrisy on terrorism (and also I can’t help thinking that Democrats like to talk tough and criticize Republicans for being wimps). The US was linked to a group that set off a car bomb that killed 80 people. Who gets to bomb whom as a result of that attack?

I think the answer to that question is supposed to be that nobody should be bombed, because we are a democracy and we can police ourselves, investigating the incident and putting people in jail if appropriate. No need to risk innocent lives being lost in a military strike . Except that nothing of the sort seems to have happened. McFarlane didn’t seem to know who was responsible, though he seemed inclined to blame the conveniently deceased Casey. It seems to have come as a shock that supporting a covert operation carrried out by a Lebanese faction might result in an act of terrorism . Fancy that, in the midst of a vicious civil war. And the interviewer lets him get away with this crap. Americans are either the dumbest effing people on the planet or the most weaselly.

Anyway if you are going to revisit Reagan’s Lebanon policy and criticize him for not blasting away at terrorists like a red-blooded American should, you should also mention the fact that his Administration was linked in some way to a car bomb attack.

He wasn't right wing at all, in fact, for a considerable time he was an ally of Stalin.

Well, for that matter, so were we.

When the subjects under discussion are Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk, I’m not sure “left” and “right” are useful categories.

Are the operations of government transparent, are government actors and institutions accountable to the people governed, does the state use force or the threat of force to establish and preserve power. I think these are the important questions.

Transparency, accountability, respect for the integrity of the individual human person. Given that, “left” and “right” are, IMO, just a way of describing particular points within a generally acceptable continuum.

It may be true that Stalin and Mao killed millions more than Hitler, but I’m not sure what relevance that fact has for comparisons of “left” and “right”. There are more people in Russia and China than there are in Germany, or in Western Europe in general. Stalin and Mao had, unfortunately for the folks they governed, bigger sandboxes to play in.

On Reagan:

Reagan deserves credit for ignoring the advice of his advisors and pursuing, directly and personally, a rapprochement with Gorbachev.

Reagan deserves all of the criticism he receives for his policies in Central and South America, for Iran-Contra, and for his knee-jerk instinct for deregulation no matter what the consequences. I could probably think of some more stuff, but I’ll stop there.

He was an idealogue, with all of the downsides that come along with that. He was a nice guy, a generally decent guy, and as noted he didn’t take the many criticisms of his persona or policies personally. Compared to GW, he was a giant. But I’m not sure he was really that great of a President.

Wherever he is now, if anywhere, I wish him well, but to be honest I don’t miss him.

I’d like to take this moment to apologize to DaveC, or rather to acknowlege one of his merits.

DaveC: I’m no more enthusiastic about your recent posts than the last time I commented on them. But Urban Coyote’s posts make me fresh appreciate your brevity. Thank you for being clear and focused. It makes the comments more enjoyable to read.

If we’re going to argue about the number of people killed by communism versus capitalism, consider that communist countries have usually made both contraception and abortion easily available, and in china both have been mandatory. So they have tended to have lower population growths. They have killed many millions of the unborn.

On the other hand, in capitalist south america contraception and abortion have been discouraged, and they have had high birth rates resulting in pathetic standards of living and a lot of premature death. Surely capitalism should be blamed for this too.

Maybe it doesn’t always make sense to blame ideologies for the things their followers do in their names. Certainly christians want to avoid blaming christianity for the various unchristian things that various self-proclaimed christians have done.

Perhaps mass death is sometimes a matter of logistics. We blame Pol Pot for the cambodian genocide, but remember that they simply did not have the food. And part of the reason they didn’t have food was our airstrikes etc. When it was obvious that cambodia was in trouble we tried to set up the Lon Nol government with the claim that we would feed cambodians who supported it. But we didn’t get the food shipments running in time — before the end they were feeding their soldiers half a cup of rice a day. We could have fed the Khmer rouge if they would only surrender, but they did not surrender. So we dumped a whole lot of rice in thailand etc for pennies to the pound, around 10% of the world market rate, because we’d been planning to send it to cambodia but we changed our minds.

When the choice is surrender versus impose careful rationing and maximise food production, is it any wonder they chose the latter?

Hitler’s genocide came at a time they didn’t have sufficient transportation to feed the loyal germans. They lacked the troops to guard the work camps they had. They hadn’t been nice people, slowly working people to death before, but the death camps came when their only better choice was to surrender and let us feed them. And we didn’t make surrender easy for them, we wanted it unconditional and we promised to hang the leaders at the very least.

Not that I’m excusing genocide. Just, given obviously awful alternatives sometimes it might seem like a good idea at the time.

If sometime in the future people are telling us that we should have known that our strategy in iraq was genocidal, and that we should have known the goal involved killing not hundreds of thousands but millions of people, we can of course respond “But I voted for Democrats. It wasn’t my fault.”.

It’s often unjustified to blame ideologies for things their proponents do. Individual blame for collective actions can come out pretty callous too.

Hitler’s genocide came at a time they didn’t have sufficient transportation to feed the loyal germans. They lacked the troops to guard the work camps they had.

JThomas, what are you talking about? The death camps began their work in early 1942, at the high-water mark of German conquest.

The Einsatzgruppen were committing genocide in the summer of 1941.

Anarch

Posted May 9, 2007 at 1:25 pm

And some of the camps, e.g. Dachau, had been running since 1933. IIRC, Goebbels in particular used Mauthausen (built 1938) as his personal “cleaner”, sending his political enemies to be worked to death there. And that goal wasn’t born of accident or indifference; the simple, straightforward intent was that these people be squeezed of every last drop of their life before being killed by exhaustion.

[IIRC, Mauthausen was also the camp Goebbels used for the torture of his enemies before their death, but it's been a while and I never really sourced that claim.]

And FWIW, the “death vans” were in circulation by late 41, euthanizing the mentally ill, certain kinds of undesirables and, most grotesquely of all, soldiers who were too sick or crippled to rejoin the war effort. The death camps were (at first) nothing but concentration camps with large-scale permanent death vans; it wasn’t until a bit later that the quantity of the dead became a quality all its own.

urban coyote

Posted May 9, 2007 at 1:26 pm

I’ve studied geopolitics all my life, and I’m not young anymore. If that sounds offensive and arrogant to you, I can live with that. I’m not trying to sell you anything here. My talents lie elsewhere. I had a long career in “unselling,” which is to say, auditing.

A lot of people who are politically on the left are sympathetic with socialism, the idea that government should own the “means of production.” They’ve come up with a myth that Hitler couldn’t possibly have been one of those people.

But “Nazi” = NASDAP = National German SOCIALIST Workers Party. That means nationalistic socialism. Some people understood exactly what this meant and left Germany right away — Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich, for example. I think they ran away even before the Reichstag fire.

Fascist = bundling together (of wheat).

The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist. That’s wrong. The second “S” in USSR stands for Socialism. In 1969, the USSR and PRC got into a furious fight over an island in the river that forms part of their border. They rattled nukes at each other. The Soviet press in Moscow started talking about the yellow hordes and their danger to civilization — etc — just like Goebbels.

Hitler had a propaganda advantage over the Soviets in that he was duly elected. So was Juan Peron in Argentina. The single most likely path to power for national socialism through an honest election is a financial crisis that leads to hyper-inflation. That kind of anarchy as a result of a government destabilizing its own currency (and therefore losing authority) is an environment where nationalistic socialism starts to sound reasonable.

So fascism is unlikely in America as long as the national budget is balanced and USA politicians don’t make promises that run up unfunded liabilities (which eventually get “paid” by running the printing press).

The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s. By paying down the national debt and keeping government small, the USA was so financially strong that it weathered a depression and still had the credibility to ramp up its borrowing, at low interest rates, to an amazing 200% of GDP to defeat national socialism in Europe and right-wing authoritarianism in imperial Japan — simultaneously.

Neither Hitler nor Tojo were good accountants. They lost.

The mistake we made was keeping the USSR as a partner after 1945. Patton was right about that. It led to an Orwellian cold war for decades that was ended, really, by the geomilitary genius of Thatcher (necessarily assisted by the materiel modernization and salesmanship of Reagan, her partner).

Since psychopathology is a naturally occurring phenomenon, the world is always incubating potential dictators. As civilized people, it behooves us to be at peace as much of the time as possible, to make sure government is a slowly sinking part of GDP in such good times (”The era of big government is over” –Bill Clinton, 1996), and to avoid long-term unfunded government obligations like poison they turn into.

That way we’ll have the financial stability and resources to kill the psychopathic beast when it next lurches out of the lagoon.

As for smaller military conflicts, we need to avoid them when possible. Unavoidable? Then rabbit-punch a blitzkreig victory immediately (like the Falklands by the UK in 1982 and Grenada by the USA in 1983). Threw away a cease-fire and had to go back, like Iraq? Rabbit-punch, partition, and leave. Our long-term, brutal under-occupation and garrisoning of Iraq is supporting the trend toward genocide. Like Jimmy Carter, I think it’s the biggest foreign policy mistake ever. I agree with Jesurgislac (!) that our badly planned Iraqi nation-building is, in fact, support of a trend toward sectarian genocide.

The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s.

Who not only had the good sense to pay down the debt, but helped create the climate conditions that allowed the River Volga to freeze each winter.

They were totally awesome.

Dantheman

Posted May 9, 2007 at 2:02 pm

Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.

John Thullen

Posted May 9, 2007 at 2:24 pm

“Patton was right about that.”

How far into the Russian steppes did Patton get in this Allied invasion of the Soviet Union that Patton was right about? Or was he bogged down in eastern Poland? I can’t remember.

Nuking Peking now will save us from doing it later. Mark my words. Especially if I’m right. If I’m not right … never mind.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 9, 2007 at 2:31 pm

I thought the USSR was Republican. It says so at the end.

The whole Nazis were really socialist thing is so boring anyway. There’s more than one way to reach an extreme totalitarian position and start murdering millions of people–in fact, you can bypass the totalitarian part and still murder millions of people. There are also lefties who say that the USSR was really a rightwing dictatorship. It’s just a way of pretending that nothing even vaguely close to one’s own political position could turn rancid.

And J Thomas, you seem to have dug yourself into a bit of a hole there. Just put the shovel down and climb back out.

Donald: And J Thomas, you seem to have dug yourself into a bit of a hole there. Just put the shovel down and climb back out.

To be fair, it was one comment followed by a pile-on of corrections: it’s entirely possible J Thomas (who hasn’t struck me as being an unreasonable person) is off somewhere having a stiff drink or a chocolate sundae or hugging his teddybear as he tries to cope with the ObWing equivalent of a hamster-pile, which is kind of spikier and less fun.

john miller

Posted May 9, 2007 at 3:50 pm

“A lot of people who are politically on the left are sympathetic with socialism, the idea that government should own the “means of production.”

Please provide names and cites of any that are leaders of the Democratic Party or have any semblance of power in this country at all. And remember, you said “a lot” which more than a few. I personally have never met anyone with that view.

The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.

Not to pile on for it’s own sake, but I can honestly say that I have never, ever, ever heard that assumption expressed, or even alluded to, by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in my entire life. And I’ve known some pretty wild-haired lefties over the years.

Not once.

You have some interesting things to say, but you really lose credibility when you come out with statements like this.

Thanks -

J Thomas

Posted May 9, 2007 at 5:16 pm

Donald, I don’t think I was out of line. Reagan was acting like early-stage alzheimers. What made it less than completely obvious was that as President mostly nobody got to hold him to account — he could hold *them* to account. When his attention wandered it was their responsibility to make their presentations in ways that would hold his attention. If he listened to them and agreed with everything and then 2 hours later he’d forgotten it all and was right back to the same old cliches, that was just Reagan being Reagan.

It isn’t exactly definitive — it’s still hard to accurately diagnose early-stage today, isn’t it? I don’t mind if some people disagree with me about it, particularly when they really really don’t want to believe it. It didn’t seem like a big pileup to me. Nothing to get upset about.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 9, 2007 at 5:31 pm

J Thomas, I was referring to the notion you seem to be expressing that the Nazis killed people in the camps largely because of wartime logistics. Ah, no. I also think you let Pol Pot off a little too easy, though it is true that Cambodia was on the brink of famine when the Khmer Rouge took over. But I gather they only made things worse. I’m perfectly willing to blame the US for enormous numbers of Cambodian deaths (no link handy, but Ben Kiernan recently published an article in the Canadian magazine called The Walrus where he says the bomb tonnage dropped was five times greater than previously known). But I don’t think more than a small fraction of the 1.7 million deaths under Pol Pot can be blamed primarily on the US. Kissinger and Nixon have quite enough blood on their hands as it is.

Hartmut

Posted May 9, 2007 at 5:43 pm

Not to forget that Reagan became president at almost 70. There are many people without Alzheimer that turn a bit senile at that age. In his second term he was not actually younger despite entering the second childhood ;-)
And as mentioned above, the unused parts stop working properly first. The acting held, the thinking probably not. For comparision the German chancellor Adenauer (who took office with 73 years) quit, when he noticed that his short-term memory began to fail (he died at nearly the same age as Reagan).

J Thomas, I was referring to the notion you seem to be expressing that the Nazis killed people in the camps largely because of wartime logistics

That argument could be made a *little* more plausibly about the Russian POWs in 1941-42, but still, to the Germans, that was a feature, not a bug.

The Wannsee Conference was pretty explicit that the Jews would be worked/starved to death, with the survivors simply executed. Of course, even that turned out to be less horrible than the death camps.

urban coyote

Posted May 10, 2007 at 12:14 am

Russell: The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Not to pile on for it’s own sake, but I can honestly say that I have never, ever, ever heard that assumption expressed, or even alluded to, by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in my entire life. And I’ve known some pretty wild-haired lefties over the years.
Not once.
You have some interesting things to say, but you really lose credibility when you come out with statements like this.

Response: Pravda was talking about the Chinese in a racist way in Moscow in 1969 when war clouds were gathering. I was in China itself in 2005 and a lot of good, well-connected party people have a furious and bitter hatred of the Japanese. It's insulting to have to listen to such racism. And even the British Labor party was pretty nationalistic from May of 1940 to July of 1945. That's why Clement Atlee won the parliamentary election in August of 1945. There's a left-wing lawyer out in Honolulu who wants Hawaiian independence and is pretty nationalistic, as an atypical example, but, in general, nowadays, wild-haired lefties in the USA don't talk that way unless they are rap singers.

Waving the flag or demonizing opponents is very common for politicians under stress, including leftists. If I were fluent in Spanish, I could probably get you some juicy, current quotes from Venezuela along these lines.
=====
John Miller: “A lot of people who are politically on the left are sympathetic with socialism, the idea that government should own the “means of production.”
Please provide names and cites of any that are leaders of the Democratic Party or have any semblance of power in this country at all. And remember, you said “a lot” which more than a few. I personally have never met anyone with that view.

Response: I didn't say American leftists holding political office â€“ they don't use a poison word like "socialist" to describe themselves. I've paid strict attention to some of the things discussed in the Social Security and Medicare subcommittees on C-SPAN, and they are very careful about how their couch their questions and positions.

The French socialists just lost an election, but they got millions of votes. I believe they are still traditional socialists. The Russians still have a socialist party that wants to go back to owning the coal mines, railroad, electricity generation, etc. In China, the means of production are in fact all still owned entirely or in majority stock by the "people" or a government agency. And party officials sit on all corporate boards. Party officials also gossip about employees, and anyone seen as politically different gets fired.

I said a "lot of people" not "most liberal Americans today." For a very long time, until the mid-90's, owning the means of production was the central element of socialism. Tony Blair changed that in the UK. I think public ownership is still the test for the left in France, Italy and Germany. I know it is for Russian leftists and for the one-party PRC. The leaders of the American Democratic party all furiously support socialism in fact (Medicare and Social Security) and all 2008 democratic candidates support "universal health care," a strictly socialist notion, but none of them label it with the inflammatory title, "socialist."

Steve

Posted May 10, 2007 at 12:29 am

So in response to Russell’s statement that he has never heard anyone assume socialists can’t be racist or nationalist, UC comes up with… examples of socialists being racist or nationalist. Unsurprising, one might conclude, because NO ONE ASSUMES THEY CAN’T BE.

urban coyote

Posted May 10, 2007 at 12:43 am

Liberal Japonicus: And for his next trick, urban coyote will explain how the German Democratic Republic a/k/a East Germany was really democratic.

A "the people aka the proleteriat" owned everything â€“making it "democratic."
========
Dantheman: Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
A "the people aka the proleteriat" own everything, making it "democratic."
==============
John Thullen: “Patton was right about that.”
How far into the Russian steppes did Patton get in this Allied invasion of the Soviet Union that Patton was right about? Or was he bogged down in eastern Poland? I can’t remember.
Nuking Peking now will save us from doing it later. Mark my words. Especially if I’m right. If I’m not right … never mind.

A: Patton died right after he said that, and he was right, war between the USSR and USA was inevitable. The conflict stayed "cold," but lasted about 45 years.

Peking and the PRC seem to be the center of long-term Pentagon planning at this time. Looks like DoD is expecting a military conflict with them approximately in the 2020's. Personally, I think it would be better if China and Japan got into a war, that way our biggest creditors would be fighting each other.
=======
Russell: The great heros who stopped Hitler, really, were the Republicans back in the 1920’s
Tell it to my uncle Cecil. His bones are bleaching away in a wheatfield in Belgium somewhere.
Or my old man, who spent four years belowdecks on troop transports in the Pacific. Or my father in law, who spent his war tramping around the Phillipines.
Or my mother in law, who spent the war bolting together Corsairs in Akron.

A: I'm sorry your uncle Cecil died in Belgium. That troop transport your father was on was easy to build fast because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920's. Your mother in law's salary and the money for Corsairs also was easy to get because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920's.

When has a country with a sound currency lost a general war? I can't think of one. Well, the USA lost Vietnam while we still had a balance of payments surplus â€“ which is why the blunder didn't damage us much geopolitically.

Be that as it may, the USA is now the world's biggest debtor and engaged in a long occupation in Iraq. "Not wise," speaking as an accountant. There's a nasty, general war about every 60 to 80 years, so it is profoundly prudent to shrink government and pay off debt in the good times. That was smart management in the 1920's. We're not doing that now.

I’m sorry, but I didn’t say what you attribute to me. My question was how Tojo’s poor accountancy skills fit into any sort of model of socialism. If you believe that Tojo was some sort of mastermind for the Greater East Asian Co=Prosperity Sphere, please disabuse yourself of the notion.

Also, while I would be interested in hearing about your experiences in China, assigning the western notions or a western origin of ’socialism’ to Chinese labor practices and social structures as if they were the root of the concept is incredibly ethnocentric and naive.

You seem to be getting confused about who is saying what, which is certainly not completely your fault, as the hits keep coming, but you might consider refocussing your points.

j thomas: As others have noted, you really need to update your Cambodian history and stop letting the Khmer Rouge off the hook for genocide.

Yes, things were terrible before 1975. Yes, there was an immediate food shortage that had to be dealt with. The view that these factors explained the death toll, even exonerated (to some extent) the KR, was found among many Asianists in the late 1970s, including Ben Kiernan (and, far less publicly, myself), and was picked up by others on the left, most famously Noam Chomsky.

From 1979 onward – if not before – we learned better. We learned about S-21 (Tuol Sleng), the Phnom Penh school where 14,000 prisoners entered and 7 (not 7,000 – seven) came out alive, and we know this because the KR, like the Nazis, kept meticulous records on file cards, with names, photographs, details of bogus “confessions,” and facts of death (usually crushed in the head with rifle butts, to save a bullet). And much much more.

No threat of starvation can come close to explaining this. No longer can we believe – as I once did – that things simply could not be as bad as they appeared, that some of the apparent “evil” must be due to unreliable evidence (refugee accounts) or deliberate distortions by enemies of the regime. It really was that horrible, and those of us who believed otherwise were forced to revise our opinions.

Ben Kiernan made his public recantation – rare for an academic, as you may know – soon after (in Journal of Contemporary Asia, IIRC) and went on to direct the Cambodian Genocide project at Yale, which is now a (global) Genocide Study Program. I had lunch with him not long ago. He’s the #1 source on this period, if you want to know what really happened, but others are also good, including my friend David Chandler.

There may be some apparent “genocides” that can be explained away, at least in part, by the terrible circumstances in which the perpetrators found themselves. Democratic Kampuchea is not one of them.

Anarch

Posted May 10, 2007 at 1:47 am

Democratic Kampuchea is not one of them.

Aha! Democracies can’t be trusted after all!

J Thomas

Posted May 10, 2007 at 2:16 am

I was referring to the notion you seem to be expressing that the Nazis killed people in the camps largely because of wartime logistics.

I see. This is one of those nuanced things.

How much better were the russian camps than the early german concentration camps? They also worked a lot of people to death. One big difference was that they didn’t supervise prisoners as much, and so didn’t so actively prevent them from growing adequate food. In some cases.

Germany had a food shortage and had to reduce the ration in early 1941. They got a breather in 1942 by taking food from eastern countries, notably russia. The food they took came from others’ mouths, others who had to starve. It was official policy to starve unneeded people of all sorts, particularly of course their enemies — and I argue that this was necessary and not just ideological, that they had to take the food. Then they could rationalise however they wanted about the people who must die.

I claim a difference between the labor camps — where they worked people to death with inadequate food, rather as the russians did — versus the six death camps where they made an attempt to kill large numbers quickly. The former started early and provided implicit revenge for the work-starvation germany suffered soon after WWI. The latter did not start until there were already serious food shortages and stopped when germany could no longer afford the resources to run them.

With the starvation etc 20+ million civilians disappeared in eastern europe during the war. The nazis could not have fed those people without making some sort of arrangement to let them peacefully grow food and distribute it. I don’t know what that would have taken, but it didn’t happen. It took several years after the war for food production to be adequately restored.

I don’t consider this a justification for death camps, or for that matter for work-to-death camps. I’m saying that the nazis consciously realised they had a major food crisis to deal with and that responding to that crisis was a central part of what they were doing. They would have done better to negotiate a surrender. Except — negotiate a surrender with Stalin? It’s easy to imagine them thinking that would not have been better. And given the mindsets involved it would have been hard for them to negotiate a surrender with the USA until we at least had an invading army in the continent of europe. And we refused to negotiate a separate surrender, leaving them to face Stalin regardless.

I’m not saying they were justified in their bad choices when I note that all their alternatives were real bad too. Just — it must have really sucked to be them.

Bruce Baugh

Posted May 10, 2007 at 2:28 am

J: The Nazi policy of racial extermination was completely outlined and set in motion before any food shortages. This is the crucial thing. At no point in the proceedings leading up to the decision to begin implementing genocide is there any presence of concern about conserving scarce resources for the Aryans; it was about extermination as an end in itself.

It would have sucked much less to be them, most likely, if they hadn’t killed or driven off so many of their sharpest thinkers and hardest workers.

Anarch

Posted May 10, 2007 at 2:35 am

urban coyote: I’ve studied geopolitics all my life, and I’m not young anymore.

Congratulations. You’re still wrong.

But “Nazi” = NASDAP = National German SOCIALIST Workers Party.

First things first: if you’re going to try to lay an intellectual smackdown on someone, get your facts right. The party’s acronym was NSDAP, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, not NASDAP (which sounds like the predecessor to the NASDAQ).

[And yes, I knew the term without looking it up. Comes of, y'know, actually having studied them.]

That means nationalistic socialism.

No, it doesn’t: it means “national socialism”. If you want nationalistic socialism, modern China’s probably the closest example.

And the “socialism” in “national socialism” doesn’t mean what you think, anyway. Anton Drexler might or might not have agreed with your definition, but that’s not what the term meant under Hitler’s aegis, as any student of German history can tell you. Consider, for example, Hitler’s belief in the free market (suitably subject to his will, natch) versus Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks.

[As an aside, when the Nazis were campaigning in the 1920s they would deliberately exaggerate certain words/phrases in the title of their party at rallies. Thus, at a farmer's rally they'd write "NATIONAL socialist GERMAN WORKERS party", while at a factory in Berlin they'd write "national SOCIALIST german WORKERS party", and in the hallowed halls of business they'd write "NATIONAL socialist GERMAN workers PARTY". Goebbels may have been evil to the core, but he knew what he was doing.]

What communitarian/collectivist tendencies the Nazis had derived from their adherence to the Fuhrerprinzip and the notion of volk. [viz "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer".] Ideologically, this has nothing whatsoever to with Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist or Maoist Communism; the closest you can come is Lenin’s notion of the vanguard party, and even then (in theory) it was intended as a means to inculcate revolutionary thought amongst the proletariat, not channel all existential power to the Chairman/Fuhrer. If you’re looking for a pat, one-sentence summation, the similarities between Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany derive from the fact that there are only so many ways power can accumulate in a totalitarian regime, not from any underlying ideological similarities.

[And citing the alliance of Hitler and Stalin as proof of their common socialism... give me a fnording break. Jesus.]

Some people understood exactly what this meant and left Germany right away — Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich, for example.

No, they understood what Nazi meant. I’ll be damn surprised if you can find a cite from either of them complaining specifically about the Nazi’s “socialist” aspects.

I think they ran away even before the Reichstag fire.

Checking Wikipedia, assuming that it can be trusted, Fritz Lang left in 1930-31 due in part to rising Nazi influence, while Marlene Dietrich left in 1930 to pursue a career in Hollywood. So yes, they left before the Reichstag fire — even before the greatest Nazi electoral successes — but it’s more complicated than you’re making it out to be.

The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.

At no point in the proceedings leading up to the decision to begin implementing genocide is there any presence of concern about conserving scarce resources for the Aryans; it was about extermination as an end in itself.

To add to what you said: this goes back to the late 30s with Mauthausen which had the specific purpose of working people to death, long before any German famine. It wasn’t technically part of the Holocaust proper but it prefigured the slaughter to come.

J Thomas

posted May 10, 2007 at 3:05 am

Dr. Ngo, I was not at all excusing the khmer rouge for their actions. However, I don’t see what 14,000 prisoners have to do with the mass starvation.

It still appears to me that they had an insoluble problem. The food wasn’t there and the gasoline wasn’t there. How could they feed cities without food or transportation? Any plan to minimise starvation would have required them either to surrender and hope we fed them, or move the urban populations out to grow food by hand labor and impose strict rationing. I don’t see a third alternative for them.

In practice they regarded the urban population as their enemies, and they did face a degree of resistance. Clamping down on that resistance left them killing lots of suspected insurgents. Then by the second year they appeared to not be particularly competent at managing mass agriculture, and then they got invaded….

Again, I’m not trying to justify what they did. My question is, suppose their goal had been to minimise the death rate without surrender. What do you suppose the death rate would have been? My guess is that if they had been very competent they could have avoided many of the deaths after the first year. If they could have avoided killing insurgents and running purges then after that time the excess deaths would come from inadequate medical care which they could not provide without foreign assistance.

So instead of maybe 1.7 million excess deaths, could it have been as low as 700,000? A million? The first year’s famine and the diseases that kill starving people surely had a big role. The 200,000+ killed for allegedly opposing the government might have been avoided, but how much of the rest? Maybe they could have gotten significant foreign assistance without a surrender. I don’t know.

Again, I’m not saying not to blame them. I’m saying they had hard choices where a lot of people were going to die whatever they chose. Maybe they’d have done better not to fight in the first place, but that would still have left them stuck with the vietnamese.

J Thomas

Posted May 10, 2007 at 3:15 am

The Nazi policy of racial extermination was completely outlined and set in motion before any food shortages. This is the crucial thing. At no point in the proceedings leading up to the decision to begin implementing genocide is there any presence of concern about conserving scarce resources for the Aryans; it was about extermination as an end in itself.

Bruce, this is another of those nuanced things. The death camp implementation decision came after germany had a food crisis.

There’s a saying that in war, amateurs discuss tactics while professionals discuss logistics.

The german high command was reasonably good about logistics. You aren’t talking about tactics, you’re talking about ideology.

Bruce Baugh

Posted May 10, 2007 at 3:50 am

J: I’ll just drop this. I find the argument you’re making both poorly justified by history and awesomely dangerous morally.

Hartmut

Posted May 10, 2007 at 5:03 am

Even the death camps had their attached factories. Auschwitz was a double camp with the working to death in one and the gassing in the other. Those who did not die in the “work” camp were transferred to the pure extermination section later. What made the death camps different was the “efficient” killing by cyanide gas after the older methods (shooting, carbon monoxide) turned out to be inefficient and too stressful for the perpetrators.
Actually the death camp logistics were more harmful to the war effort than the old ways. Although there is no unanimous consent between historians, the opinion that Hitler wanted to “finish the job” before the war situation would put a stop to it has quite a following. There are also hints that Hitler/Himmler believed/feared that it was a now or never situation and that the Holocaust could not be executed in peace time and would have to be stopped like the early euthanasia (that was then restarted in secret during the war).
The “useless eaters” argument was publicly leveled against allegedly deficient “Aryan” Germans, not typically against Jews (cf. e.g. German school textbooks of the time with arithmetic problme of the type “How many Aryan families can you feed with the money wasted for mental asylums?”).

Hartmut, this is a minor detail but there’s a lot of reason to think that not many people were killed by cyanide in german death camps. Cyanide is expensive and dangerous. It had been used to kill relatively small numbers of handicapped people etc. This is not particularly important — the people at the death camps winded up dead whether it was by cyanide or not.

I agree that the whole thing wasted resources the war effort needed. They had killed over a million jews and some very large number of other civilians on the eastern front simply by shooting them. They made a big deal of impressing concentration camp guards that the inmates were not worth a bullet, but the expense of collecting them and transporting them and guarding them was probably more — I suppose it would take a good accountant to total up the details, maybe UC will do that for us.

While the nazis had plans to systematically kill 30-50 million slaves, they didn’t get around to transporting them to camps. All they did was to confiscate as much of the food as they could find, which tended to serve the same purpose but gave them a large no-man’s-land they needed to convoy through toward the front. The surviving cannibals behind german lines would sometimes manage a force large enough to take out a german supply convoy.

Dantheman

Posted May 10, 2007 at 8:42 am

urban coyote,

“Liberal Japonicus [actually Dantheman]: And for his next trick, urban coyote will explain how the German Democratic Republic a/k/a East Germany was really democratic.

A "the people aka the proleteriat" owned everything â€“making it "democratic."
========
Dantheman: Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
A "the people aka the proleteriat" own everything, making it "democratic."”

Thus proving that you have no clue what democracy means (hint — ownership of means of production has nothing to do with it, and forms of choosing leaders does), I am cutting off debate with you.

john miller

Posted May 10, 2007 at 9:23 am

urban coyote, I now formally take back one of my earlier statements to you about your having a lot of knowledge. You may in some areas but since I find you either responding in non sequitors or responding with statements that are quickly refuted as being false, I think it more approrpiate you either do stick to your field of “expertise” or phrase your wording as expressing your opinions rather than facts.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 10, 2007 at 9:30 am

J, I think you’ve phrased things very badly and you are taking one argument about what happened in Cambodia that I’d make myself and transforming it into something I don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to ask how many people might have continued to die in Cambodia in the immediate postwar period even if it had been run by Oxfam, but it’s the way you put yourself in the shoes of the Khmer Rouge leadership and talk about their tough choices that really grates on people (or me, anyway). These guys weren’t struggling with moral dilemmas. They took a situation where Cambodia was on the brink of starvation and imposed a deliberate policy of genocide on top of that. What’s driving me batty in your posts is stuff like the following–

“Again, I’m not saying not to blame them. I’m saying they had hard choices where a lot of people were going to die whatever they chose. Maybe they’d have done better not to fight in the first place, but that would still have left them stuck with the vietnamese.”

I started to parse that line by line, but deleted it, because I think you mean well and simply don’t know how obscene that sounds. Basically the problem here is that you acknowledge in a perfunctory way that yes, it was bad for the Khmer Rouge to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of people, but gosh, they had tough choices and a lot of people would have died no matter what. Well, yes, but you do see that choosing to commit genocide in these circumstances means that many hundreds of thousands more died than would have died otherwise. You do see that, don’t you?

I’m guessing the point you are trying to make is that the US bears much of the blame for what happened to Cambodia. Our bombing campaign probably killed tens or hundreds of thousands directly and created a situation where Cambodia was on the brink of famine, with thousands dying of malnutrition every month during the closing phases of the war. The bombing also recruited for the Khmer Rouge. But you could make this point without sounding like someone sympathetic to the purely hypothetical dilemmas faced by the Khmer Rouge leadership, as though they were trying to minimize suffering after the war. This is both wrong and offensive and it gets in the way of any legitimate point you might be trying to make.

BTW, your figures for the number of Khmer Rouge executions is probably low. Vickery (whose numbers are low at 700,000 excess deaths) thinks the number of executions was 300,000 and I think Kiernan estimates it at about half or more of the total (which he says was 1.7 million).

Hartmut

Posted May 10, 2007 at 9:32 am

Concerning the killing of Slaves (not slaves), that was not a first priority for Hitler. He even welcomed a permanent partisan problem (after the war) because it would keep the German settlers in Eastern Europe from becoming soft. Additionally the Ural was envisioned as a “bleeding border” where the German youth would learn the trade of war.
The true extermination camps were for the “final solution of the Jewish question” (add the Gypsies). The mass death of civilians in the East were indeed more a “we feed our own first and the natives can have what remains” than a “genocide now” measure.
The switch to cyanide was due to the mentioned problems of stress and inefficiency of killing by hand (and the low reliability of CO) as can be read in the internal discussions. Even the Einsatzgruppen showed signs of mental breakdown after a while (Himmler himself could not stomach the view of the mass executions by gun) and this was the main reason that the regular army usually tried to avoid participation (no moral objection but justified fear of undermining morale and discipline).

Btw, nice thread shift from McCains grin over Reagan to the details of Nazi atrocities we have made here.
I’ll get out of the discussion at this point but would be willing to participate in a thread devoted to this (i.e. I do not admit defeat by quitting).

J Thomas, kindly quit making stuff up, or provide us some actual authority for this “food shortages led to the death camps” Nazi-apologist crap.

urban coyote

Posted May 10, 2007 at 2:18 pm

Anarch said Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich left in 1930 or 1931. That may be right but I've read that they were back in Germany and both left for the last time in January of 1933. They were especially after Lang because of his movie, “The Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse.” Dietrich was offered stardom by Hitler’s propaganda industry and left the country instead! That’s what I’ve read.

Anarch:The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Ok, I’ll call your bluff: name for me any person here who believes this. Citations are required.

Response: I'm sorry, again, Hitler was a socialist and a nationalist. He left some bones and privitization to the corporate chieftains who backed him, yes. But the liberals and socialists went along with making his chancellor because their Party was full of socialist planks and concerns. And Hitler initially governed as a socialist, building the autobahns (which of course had military applications), and funding an unending stream of folk gatherings to celebrate German heritage. Ditto radio programs, especially featuring German classical music. He championed "the people's car," the Volkswagen (though he didn't design nor build it, but then there came the military version, the kubelwagen). And urban planning, including a grand scheme for Berlin. Looks like socialism, acts like socialism, it's in the title of the party.

I don't argue that Hitler used socialism as a political prop and foil to himself become a dictator. The "real" socialists who were his political and party allies in the 1920's were minimized or murdered early on.

Anarch said, "What communitarian/collectivist tendencies the Nazis had derived from their adherence to the Fuhrerprinzip and the notion of volkâ€¦" Response: Very cogent and thorough. But I think that's enough right there to prove my point. The most telling similarity of all is that both Lenin and Hitler talked as collectivists in order to arrogate absolute power to themselves. I don't think I'm climbing out on a limb to call that a "left-wing" power grab that calls itself socialism and differentiate that with a right-wing power grab, say, Salazar in Portugal or Tojo in Japan.

Common examples of flag-waving nationalistic "socialists" today frequently include Chavez in Venezuela talking about the USA, the PRC talking about Taiwan, Tibet or, very especially, Japan, and Cuba in general. Actual citation of a socialist talking about nationalism: There are BOOKS on this, such as: Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China
By Hung Yongnian Zheng. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.

And articles such as this from The New Economy Information Service, "The Other Face Of Nationalism: Cuba and China" by Richard Wilson, September 28, 2000:

"The Cuban ruling class is also without the prop of Marxism. No longer justifying their position as defenders of workers, they “live in exclusive neighborhoods, drive late-model European cars, and often wear Guccis and Rolexes.” Instead, it is in national sovereignty, “the small besieged country” in the face of the colossus of the North where they find loyalty to the present regime. Democratic oppositionists are then tools of American imperialism.
"The rulers in China make a similar appeal. Every issue, for example, touching in any way on Taiwan or Tibet receives heavy play in the press — featured as still another attack on the territorial integrity of China. It is an appeal that finds a deep resonance for many, building on longheld resentments at foreign interference in China’s history. Unlike the Soviet Union in its day, neither China nor Cuba claims to be an international model for export. Any such dreams have long gone. Instead, it is quite the opposite–the ideological appeal is to national independence and self-reliance in an antagonistic world. "

For an hilarious racist rant by the COMMUNISTS against the bourgeois (?!) Chavez in Venezuela, take a look at http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/860/venezuela.html . Yes, the far left screams taunts at other leftists and those shouts devolve to racist arguments against the nationalistic stances of the impure middle class parvenues who are merely pretending socialism.
===============
And both the Soviets and Mao rattled nuclear sabres at each other over Dubrinksy Island in 1969. The party papers, especially Pravda, became not only nationalistic but racist in their rhetoric. A war between these dictatorships would have been to the advantage of the USA, but Nixon intervened on China's side (!), which started the normalization of Sino-American relations. Doesn't anyone remember this?!
==============
Dantheman: Followed by showing how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a/k/a North Korea is also truly democratic.
A "the people aka the proleteriat" own everything, making it "democratic."”
Thus proving that you have no clue what democracy means (hint — ownership of means of production has nothing to do with it, and forms of choosing leaders does), I am cutting off debate with you.

Response: Calm down, Dantheman. Communists really use language in this manner. The proletariat supposedly owns everything, there's no property, so a one-party gathering of the propertyless party members is "democratic" and the rubber-stamp congress really is the people speaking, as opposed to the bourgeois corruption of multi-party western governments. Communists talk about one party rule and "dictatorship of the proletariat" as "true" democracy. And that's what they mean when they title their country with the word, as is done in North Korea and was done in East Germany. That proves that they SUBVERT what democracy means, and that I honestly transcribed that jargon, not that I don't know the definition.

john miller

Posted May 10, 2007 at 2:23 pm

I won’t even try to get an actual answer to the questions any more.

Steve

Posted May 10, 2007 at 2:25 pm

I have to reiterate my 12:29am comment, only with Anarch rather than Russell in the starring role. Seriously, I feel like we’re debating the crazy guy on the subway here.

Please excuse me while I go out and quietly beat myself over the head with a calendar.

hairshirthedonist

Posted May 10, 2007 at 3:08 pm

What does Urban Coyote have to do to disabuse you guys of the notion that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist? Man, you guys are thick!

spartikus

Posted May 10, 2007 at 3:12 pm

What does Urban Coyote have to do to disabuse you guys of the notion that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist?

I’m thinking he needs to offer each of us a piece of delicious, delicious pie.

Larv

Posted May 10, 2007 at 3:20 pm

Wait, so building the Autobahn is governing like a socialist? By that standard Ike was a damned dirty Red also, what with his interstate highway system and collectivization of industry. Well, okay, he didn’t actually do that last part, but I’m sure he wanted to. After all, those highways show his true colors, don’t they?

J Thomas

Posted May 10, 2007 at 3:42 pm

I think it’s perfectly legitimate to ask how many people might have continued to die in Cambodia in the immediate postwar period even if it had been run by Oxfam, but it’s the way you put yourself in the shoes of the Khmer Rouge leadership and talk about their tough choices that really grates on people (or me, anyway).

It sounds like it’s a problem of tone. I’ve run into that brfore on this general topic, and I have no idea how to say these obvious things inoffensively. Would you help me? Could you show me howto say it innocuously?

I started to parse that line by line, but deleted it, because I think you mean well and simply don’t know how obscene that sounds. Basically the problem here is that you acknowledge in a perfunctory way that yes, it was bad for the Khmer Rouge to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of people, but gosh, they had tough choices and a lot of people would have died no matter what. Well, yes, but you do see that choosing to commit genocide in these circumstances means that many hundreds of thousands more died than would have died otherwise. You do see that, don’t you?

No, I don’t. They needed strict rationing and they needed to increase food production. The rationing was far easier with the population in camps. The food production might have been easier that way, though a lot of private plots might have done better. Then they had the problem of staying in control, which at the time meant killing their opponents and potential opponents. Then the planning went wrong and they didn’t notice at first because their local people were falsifying reports –too afraid to tell the truth. And of course the leaders blamed it on saboteurs since they of course wouldn’t accept responsibility themselves. Then they had a purge to get rid of the saboteurs and morale went down even more. There’s nothing particularly novel there. No special choices for genocide, just a lot of people playing CYA and that’s the result.

But it starts with the food supply. They were going to have a famine regardless, and their initial choices were correct for the circumstance. And then each time they failed to produce enough food they had a choice of who would die, not a choice whether to kill people.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 10, 2007 at 4:20 pm

Okay, J Thomas, I was trying to offer you a way out, but you just took that shovel and dug yourself in so deep you’d need a firetruck ladder to climb out at this point.

Killing, I don’t know, conservatively 300,000 people (and I mean actual murders, not just excess deaths from starvation and the actual number of deaths from violence might be closer to 1 million), just to stay in power? Gee, who wouldn’t make that decision? A few purges here and there and all of a sudden, before you even know what’s happening, you’ve bludgeoned or shot or otherwise violently killed off the population equivalent of a major city. No choice at all. Gosh, one can only feel sorry for the poor people making the tough decisions.

Whatever. I thought maybe you were just very clumsy with your wording. Maybe not.

J Thomas

Posted May 10, 2007 at 4:33 pm

J Thomas, kindly quit making stuff up, or provide us some actual authority for this “food shortages led to the death camps” Nazi-apologist crap.

No apologies.

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:nm9P1la86eIJ:www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/ZIF%2520Conference/Tanner.doc+1942+nazi+
Look at chapter 3 particularly."Planning was not on a national but on a continental scale and where agricultural production did not suffice to meet the future needs of Greater Germany the solution was sought in a restructuring not of Germany's but of Europe's agriculture."24 In this strategy, military occupation was directly linked with ecnomic exploitation and in the "Old Reich", forced food imports were sufficient to avoid severe food shortages until 1944-45. [....] In Hitlers concept of foreign policy, food policy was not an aspect like any others, but the core-element. [....] To be sure, due to difficulties in the occupied countries, the rations had to be cut back already in spring 1941, which lead to annoyance among the german population. The aggression of the USRR in June 1941 brough a temporary relief, but already in 1942 new bottlenecks occured and the political authorities became nervous because they feard a progressive loss of conficence in the "Volk".

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:u7MVnaC3-G8J:www.yale.edu/gsp/publications/Annihila.doc+Plans for the economic exploitation of the occupied territories had been considered in some detail by German civilian and military experts in advance of the invasion. A statement of goals for the upcoming campaign from early May 1941 succinctly noted: "1. The war can only be continued if all armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of war. 2. There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us."

I don’t see that this is in any way controversial. It only starts to seem special if you interpret the facts in terms of claiming the nazis in some way were justified.

I don’t claim the nazis were in any way justified in what they did. I only claim that they saw no alternative to genocide except surrender. Nor do I see a third alternative they could have taken.

It isn’t a great big stretch to point to our current failing occupation of iraq, in which many of us argue that we must continue our inhumane policies because the only alternative is defeat. They’d far rather dish it out than take it.

Killing, I don’t know, conservatively 300,000 people (and I mean actual murders, not just excess deaths from starvation and the actual number of deaths from violence might be closer to 1 million), just to stay in power? Gee, who wouldn’t make that decision?

It’s a structural thing. In winner-take-all political systems, it isn’t like you lose an election and then put up with your mirror-image running the government for a few years until they lose too.

Lose the government, then you and your supporters can expect to be purged. Lots of deaths for the people you like best. It’s a big deal.

It seemed to happen a lot in communist nations. The nazis did it too. And of course indonesia.

And yet Bush hasn’t done anything like it, beyond early retirement for a handful of generals. When things go badly wrong like Katrina he doesn’t call for a purge to eliminate the saboteurs and wreckers, he says he has complete confidence in the incompetents and then after a long time he fires one person. By truly valuing loyalty he keeps his people loyal. Maybe it’s because we are still so rich.

Steve

Posted May 10, 2007 at 4:58 pm

So if the Jews had won the election, the Nazis would have been sent to camps? I’m not following.

Since I have the book out anyway: this is a cartoon from 1919, depicting the result of the peacetreaty of Versaille.

In those years there was a lot of discussion in the Dutch press about what might be the result of the harsh conditions and wether the Germans would end up seeking revenge.

One last one, because I can’t resist: The caption reads: “Germany’s Future” and in smaller caps: “Freedom: it is written that the woman will give birth to the child in pain”. Hmmmm… birthpangs…. where did I hear that recently?

J Thomas

Posted May 10, 2007 at 6:10 pm

So if the Jews had won the election, the Nazis would have been sent to camps? I’m not following.

Steve, “the jews” couldn’t have won an election.

The issue in cambodia was a coup or equivalent. If the leadership got the blame for failures, then somebody else might take over and not face a lot of resistance. And the old leadership would have to be kept from causing trouble, and the most reliable way to keep them from doing that is to kill them.

There was some of that in germany too, of course. Rommel was secretly killed partly because he couldn’t prove he hadn’t been in a plot to kill Hitler, but primarily because he was popular enough to lead an opposition.

I don’t justify any of this, and I want to point out that it’s a systemic problem more than an individual moral problem. It’s far easier to make monstrous moral choices when the alternative is that you will be killed and your extended family sent to a concentration camp. It’s easier to make decisions that will result in millions of foreigners dying when the clear alternative is that millions of your citizens will die.

And it’s easy to fall into the trap of valuing loyalty over competence. If you can’t afford to lose, then competent administrators who aren’t on your side are all likely enemies.

So for example, if Bush happened to believe that if there was a Democratic administration in 2008 he would wind up in Gitmo charged with treason, or at the World Court charged with war crimes, how far would you expect him to go to keep that from happening?

Not that he’d be “justified”, but where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?

Anarch

Posted May 10, 2007 at 9:06 pm

A little long, but it’s hard to be brief when discussing fascist and socialist ideologies.

urban coyote: Anarch:The assumption some of you make is that “socialists” can’t ever be, really, nationalistic or racist.
Ok, I’ll call your bluff: name for me any person here who believes this. Citations are required.

Response: I'm sorry, again, Hitler was a socialist and a nationalist.

First, answer the question that was actually asked. This constant evasion is getting annoying.

Second, I’m sorry, again, that you’re wrong.

But the liberals and socialists went along with making his chancellor because their Party was full of socialist planks and concerns.

I don’t know what you mean by “liberal”, but Hitler had no measurable support amongst socialists whatsoever. They had their party — either the Social Democratic Party (the center-left party that ran Germany until the ‘33 elections) or the KPD (formerly the Spartakists) — and they restricted their votes thereto. There were converts to Nazism (most notably Goebbels, who really was a socialist [and a nationalist] before his conversion) but the point is that they were converts, not socialists who held their nose and voted for Hitler. [IIRC, Goebbels regarded Hitler with something close to contempt before the late 20s.] Shortly after Hitler’s return, he squashed any and all notions of the Nazis as Communists or Socialists, arguing that Communism/Socialism/Bolshevism — he didn’t really distinguish — was a Jewish plot. That was the whole point of the Reichstag fire, of the assimilation of the Freikorps and the Nazi anti-labor attacks, and of the purges of the 30s (starting with the Night of the Long Knives and working on from there).

And Hitler initially governed as a socialist, building the autobahns (which of course had military applications)…

…which isn’t inherently socialist…

…and funding an unending stream of folk gatherings to celebrate German heritage. Ditto radio programs, especially featuring German classical music.

…which isn’t socialist either.

[You're also missing the German national exchange program, whose name I don't remember, that was designed to break down internal German divisions and give rise to a true pan-German nationalism. That's the closest to a socialist policy the Nazis had.]

This is something that apparently confuses some people, so let me break this down as simply as I can: communitarian != socialist. Socialism is a very specific ideology; in its stronger forms, put simply, it asserts that those who produce should control the means of production, especially in the “heavy industries”. Ultimately the entire world should consist of a proletariat working communally towards a common good, freed of the “tyranny” of private property. Socialism argues that all people — or at least all laborers — are equal regardless of their origins, their race or their nationality. It permits elections as a means of self-organization; social democrats in fact require this, while other non-vanguard socialisms tend to assume that governmental organization will simply arise organically as those most capable of organization would inevitably move to a organizational positions.

This does not describe Nazism at all.

Nazism was a racist, nationalist ideology organized along the lines of the Fuhrerprinzip: all power derived from a strong leader, each of whom was subject to a still-higher leader, culminating in the Fuhrer. The Fuhrer’s whims are as law; his desires are the nation’s desires; there is, in fact, no distinction between the Fuhrer and the nation-state. It explicitly disallows all forms of democratic governance; no-one was elected Gauleiter, for example, after Hitler’s return in 1926, and even the mere notion of an elected Gauleiter would have been incomprehensible to a Nazi. And unlike socialism, it explicitly argues that people are not equal, that the Fuhrer is infinitely superior to the rest of the nation, that his subordinates are superior to everyone else, and so on down the line until one reaches the vast mass of German people who are inferior to the actual members of the Nazi party, but are superior in every respect to all other peoples… while certain races (specifically the Slavs and the Jews) are inherently inferior to all other peoples.

[Until the alliance with the Japanese, that is. Then the German people became the ubermenschen of the Aryan race, while the Japanese became the ubermenschen of the Asiatic race. I have no idea who the untermenschen of the Asiatic race were, and I doubt the Nazis thought it out that far.]

There were aspects of communitarianism in Nazism — specifically the notion of volk — but the Nazis never reorganized along communitarian lines, they never eliminated the free market, they never eliminated currency, they never nationalized the heavy industries, they never liquidated the kulaks/bourgeoisie, and they sure as hell never tried to eliminate the family. Socialism is explicitly a progressive ideology in the literal sense, i.e. its ideal world is the ultimate progression of history; Nazism is explicitly both a regressive and transformative ideology in the sense that it harkens back to an earlier idealized age which can only be realized through the force of the Fuhrer’s will.

That’s the theoretical difference between the two ideologies; in practice some of the distinctions I’m drawing here were blurred, as they are in any real-world situation. Part of the trouble is that there are uncounted variations on socialism, while only one form of Nazism; and even if you expand into the full panoply of fascisms, they’ll never really be comparable. Socialism is a universalist ideology deriving from a specific literary corpus (Marx, Lenin etc.) — as distinct from social democracy, which is a more mainstream, reformist ideology — while fascism is a regressive, localized ideology deriving at least in part from the specific cultural heritage of the particular culture in which it arises.

[Hence, for example, American socialism will pretty much look like socialism anywhere else; while American fascism, should such became widespread, will be unique to the United States.]

Looks like socialism, acts like socialism, it's in the title of the party.

No, it doesn’t look like socialism. No, it didn’t act like socialism. Yes, it was in the title — but it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I don't argue that Hitler used socialism as a political prop and foil to himself become a dictator. The "real" socialists who were his political and party allies in the 1920's were minimized or murdered early on.

Which is to say, they weren’t socialist at all. Well done.

The most telling similarity of all is that both Lenin and Hitler talked as collectivists in order to arrogate absolute power to themselves.

No they didn’t. Lenin talked of himself as a collectivist; Hitler talked about himself as Fuhrer. Compare, e.g., What Is To Be Done? with Mein Kampf; or Lenin’s rabble-rousing at the Duma with any of the Nuremberg rallies for that matter.

I don't think I'm climbing out on a limb to call that a "left-wing" power grab that calls itself socialism and differentiate that with a right-wing power grab, say, Salazar in Portugal or Tojo in Japan.

Oh, you are. You’re out past the limb and onto the twigs, even. The only commonality was that Hitler and Lenin both headed an enormously popular mass movement instead of leading military coups, which has precisely zero to do with right-wing versus left-wing.

[And for the last time, the Nazis never referred to themselves as "socialist". It was "national socialism" and Hitler, a staunch anti-socialist, never let anyone forget it.]

Anarch

Posted May 10, 2007 at 9:07 pm

J Thomas: Not that he’d be “justified”, but where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?

Response: Pravda was talking about the Chinese in a racist way in Moscow…

I have no doubt that is true. That is because I find it quite believable that one can be both a socialist and a racist and/or nationalist.

I’ve never met anyone who argue the contrary. That was my point.

You’ve failed to address it.

I'm sorry your uncle Cecil died in Belgium.

Me too. He was my father’s closest and best friend when they were young.

That troop transport your father was on was easy to build fast because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920's. Your mother in law's salary and the money for Corsairs also was easy to get because the USA had a sound currency from the 1920's.

There are lots and lots of reasons why the US was able to mobilize quickly for war. Maybe the “sound fiscal policies” of the 20’s were part of it, but anyone I know who lived through the 30’s would find the juxtaposition of the phrases “sound fiscal policy” and “the 20’s” to be kind of a cruel joke.

Personally, I think it had a lot more to do with everyone’s willingness to pitch in and do whatever was necessary. I’m sure my mother in law got paid, but I’m equally sure she would have worked double shifts building planes for three hots and a cot.

Things were different then.

I’m thinking he needs to offer each of us a piece of delicious, delicious pie.

Strawberry rhubarb for me. Yum!

Thanks -

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 1:36 am

“where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?”

A long f***ing way before genocide, that’s for damn sure.

You think? So if it turns out the reports are true that food distribution has been cancelled for Anbar, you figure that later Bush will say he didn’t know?

J Thomas,
I’ve lost track a bit of where the problem is, but you did say that you’ve gotten this reaction before. I suspect it is because, when discussion causation, people who are further away from the actual act are assumed to be less responsible, so most people would have a hard time claiming that the person who mined the ore that made the pistol that killed someone was in some ways responsible for the death. This tends to give heads of state a lot of wiggle room. However, in claiming that food shortages or other choices ‘forced’ people into genocide, you make that wiggle room into a 360 degree range of movement. When we talk about people be forced by circumstances, we think of Andean plane survivors turning to cannibalism, or homeowners shooting someone breaking and entering, direct consequences of particular situations. To claim that genocide is the direct consequence of a food shortage provides perpetrators far too much distance from their acts, which I think is why people don’t react too kindly to your argumentation.

Anarch

Posted May 11, 2007 at 2:50 am

You think? So if it turns out the reports are true that food distribution has been cancelled for Anbar, you figure that later Bush will say he didn’t know?

I actually have no idea what hypothetical you’re posing here. Mind rephrasing?

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 4:14 am

LP, I certainly don’t claim that any of these people were forced into genocide.

They had the alternative choice of unconditional surrender. In every case it’s possible that if they surrendered their enemies would fix their problems for them better than they could for themselves.

LP, I certainly don’t claim that any of these people were forced into genocide.

Really?

We blame Pol Pot for the cambodian genocide, but remember that they simply did not have the food.

You mention unconditional surrender, but my reading is that you are excusing Pol Pot because of food rationing. You did ask why people misread you, and with statements like this, no matter how carefully qualified, you leave the impression that Pol Pot is not to blame for the genocide.

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 5:11 am

Anarch, iraq does not grow nearly enough food to feed their people. Under Saddam large amounts of food were imported, mostly grains and beans, and rationed to the public. By early estimates 85% of the population depended on their ration cards to survive, though the ration was not considered sufficient. More recent estimates claim that only 75% of the population needs the distributed food to survive. Official US policy has been that this is socialist and should be stopped, but in the short run we found no way to switch to something closer to free enterprise. Saddam (and later Bremer) got a degree of marketing clout by buying in large quantities on the world market. In 2004 the CPA had the goal of increasing food stocks to have 6 months of food on hand so that temporary distribution glitches wouldn’t be such a concern, they had the problem that the port which handled food imports was damaged and couldn’t run at full capacity but fixing it involved temporarily reducing the capacity.

The general dependence on rationed food is the reason that votes have been done based on ration cards — they’re the nearest thing to a census.

There have been rather low-key reports that the unrest in sunni areas of the country has required the iraqi government to stop attempting to distribute food in those areas. There was an implication that the food shipments will start again when order is restored.

This is something that *could* turn genocidal. It is after all much easier to stop significant food smuggling across the western border of iraq than it is to stop arms smuggling. But it’s sort of hypothetical at this point. I have no data about how many sunnis are dependent on the rations. Possibly they are the 25% of the public that is claimed not to depend on them. Perhaps we wouldn’t stop food shipments from other sunni nations. Perhaps the sunnis would surrender easily, and their surrender would be accepted quickly.

There are various ways this could turn out that would kill less than 10% of the sunni population. And after all, how do we decide when it’s genocide? Does it have to kill 50% of a defined population? 10%? A million people?

Saddam said iraq was 35% sunni, the CIA estimated 20%. Call it 5 to 8 million people. So it couldn’t be a very big genocide. 10% of them is still less than a million.

And if it goes through like that, Bush can say he didn’t know. It wasn’t his choice, it was done entirely by the iraqi government with no advice from americans. It wasn’t even the iraqi government’s fault — they couldn’t ship in the food when there was so much violence. It was entirely the sunnis’ fault for being so violent. And when the US Army found out what was happening we did everything we could. We sent over 100,000 MREs to Anbar, and we set up refugee camps where we let the iraqi government feed people safely. A tragedy, but one that would have been infinitely worse if we weren’t there to help.

“where do you think he’d draw the line at doing awful things that were likely to work?”

A long f***ing way before genocide, that’s for damn sure.

You think? I think it isn’t such a very long distance.

It’s an honest-to-goodness slippery slope. I could likely make the mistake of sliding into genocide rather than defeat, if it was my choice. I believe you might. I have no doubt whatsoever about Bush.

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 5:33 am

You mention unconditional surrender, but my reading is that you are excusing Pol Pot because of food rationing. You did ask why people misread you, and with statements like this, no matter how carefully qualified, you leave the impression that Pol Pot is not to blame for the genocide.

I’m not talking about blame. That might be the problem. You’re looking for someone to blame it on and I’m not.

I’m saying that anyone else in Pol Pot’s position, faced with his problems, might have made a plan rather similar to his plan. And then he faced the problem of the people he led, who considered the cityfolk their enemies.

The USA had food and gasoline we could theoretically have given them, enough of each to get food to cities. But what could get us to give those to Pol Pot? Without food and transportation, he had to mostly abandon the cities and put the urban people to work growing food. They’d have a very tight year until the crops were in. Strict rationing could minimise the losses until then.

And then as his organisation unraveled he’d have less and less chance to correct the errors. The first priority for a ruler is to stay on top — lose that and you lose the chance to do anything important.

Regardless of Pol Pot’s personal preferences, he was riding a tiger and he couldn’t get off or change course. That tends to happen after revolutions. We’re lucky it doesn’t happen more often.

What could he have done? He could have chosen not to get on that tiger in the first place. Somebody else would have, and we’d wind up talking about the other guy. Or he might have done something real creative to change the situation. It was a systemic problem and people who just looked at how to survive or prosper in it could do nothing more than play their parts. There’s some sort of chance he could have found a way to change the system. There’s always that hope.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 11, 2007 at 7:47 am

“I’m saying that anyone else in Pol Pot’s position, faced with his problems, might have made a plan rather similar to his plan. And then he faced the problem of the people he led, who considered the cityfolk their enemies.”

This is just apologetics. I’m sorry to say this, because some of what you say I tend to agree with, but you’re determined to force everything to fit your theories and the result is pretty sickening.

Revolutions, to paraphrase Chomsky making a fairly obvious point, tend to spawn counter-revolutionary violence and this generally leads to a fairly ruthless element coming out on top no matter who wins. But that ruthless element does have choices to make. And the Khmer Rouge obviously chose to be ruthless on a scale that has few parallels and that can’t be justified as a rational (even if immoral) choice. Suppose we put aside any questions of morality and adopt the ruthless viewpoint. There was absolutely no rational reason to kill (actually murder, not just starve) anywhere from 300,000 to 1 million people. Communist and other dictatorships, God knows, have no regard for human rights, but most of them have managed to stay in power without actually murdering ten percent of the population, most of them posing no threat to them. The neighboring Vietnamese communists were perfectly capable of committing enormous atrocities, but they didn’t come close to killing the percentages the Khmer Rouge killed. It just isn’t “necessary” to do this, no matter how much pent up hatred there is in society. To be as cold-blooded about it as you are, the Khmer Rouge could have stayed in power by killing far fewer people, the way most other dictatorships manage it.

I tend to agree with those who say that Western leaders are as ruthless as most of the people they love to condemn as monsters. What LJ said about people giving heads of state lots of wiggle room certainly doesn’t apply to me–I think heads of state do get all sorts of completely undeserved wiggle room. As I see it, Bush is far more guilty than Lyndie England of torture, for example.

Unfortunately, what you are doing is giving Pol Pot enormous amounts of wiggle room. You seem to take some sort of misbegotten pride in what you perceive to be your analytical rigor, but all you end up doing is looking for reasons to excuse high-ranking officials from their guilt, because of your theory about how it’s all determined and unavoidable. Bulls***

Slartibartfast

Posted May 11, 2007 at 8:35 am

I’m saying that anyone else in Pol Pot’s position, faced with his problems, might have made a plan rather similar to his plan.

Ah, this brings me back. When I was in high school, my German teacher (who was born in a part of Poland that became Germany, and then perhaps turned back into Poland again) told us all, completely seriously, that if we were in Hitler’s position we would have done what he did.

And I agreed: if we were completely stripped of all morality, had convinced ourselves that all acts done in the name of (forwarding the master race) or (securing personal power) were acceptable, and were able to Blame the Jews with a straight face, why, of course we’d be willing to corral Jews, homosexuals and various other undesirables into camps, systematically starve, work and torture them to death, and conduct an absolutely insane series of incursions into other countries.

Yep, it’s simple: if we were Hitler (or Pol Pot), we’d have done the same as he did.

As we aren’t, I’m going out on a limb and stating categorically that we wouldn’t.

That was one of those situations where I was so absolutely flabbergasted that I couldn’t speak. Fortunately, there was a young lady in my class who could speak, and did. It probably didn’t make it any easier on him that it was the same young lady who constantly corrected his grammar.

If you think any of us would do a Pol Pot, or a Hitler, I’m guessing that means you think you would as well, which gives me all manner of the creeps. At least we’ll not be wanting for lampshades.

In 1975 they mostly could no longer import gasoline. They needed to support 7.3 million people with 1874 technology, or else get somebody to give them food and/or gasoline.

I suppose one possibility would have been to march their surplus population to the borders and force them into refugee status. But thailand wasn’t willing to take many refugees at all. Vietnam had already taken vietnamese refugees but didn’t want others. Laos?

In good times cambodia exported rice and rubber to get foreign exchange. They didn’t have enough rice and not much rubber to export.

Perhaps they could depend on foreign charity? I think maybe they didn’t try hard enough to find out what was available that way. However, the USA was very strongly against aid to cambodia by anyone that the USA could influence.

Perhaps they could sign long-term colonial contracts, and promise to sell their future exports at low cost to pay for today’s food? The exact arrangement they’d fought to avoid?

If they had 2 million people they couldn’t feed, why is it an issue if they killed some of them before they starved?

The floods of 1975 and 1978 hurt them a lot, of course. Worst floods in a century. Probably not expected.

Apparently the khmer rouge tried to stockpile food to prepare for a vietnamese invasion, and the stockpiled food could have saved some people. But then, the invasion came on schedule. Would they have done better to feed more people and arrange an orderly surrender? Would that have worked out well?

Their ideology may have played a part. They believed in being self-reliant and in depending strongly on agriculture with minimal industry. They believed in collective farming. We don’t believe that’s an efficient way to grow food. But everybody’s wrong beliefs bite them.

If you were in their place, what would you do?

Here’s another one. What if the time comes that the USA can’t get much oil? For awhile we can pump enough of our own for 40% or less of our domestic needs, supposing we don’t sell any for hard currency.

Our heavily mechanised agriculture lets 3% of our population grow more than enough for all of us. Our efficient diesel railways and diesel trucking system quickly brings that food across the country to urban centers.

If we had to revert to an 1870 economy or a 1910 economy, how ruthless would our government be about it? Say it had to be a short quick transition and not a slow smooth one….

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 10:38 am

Looking back I see I accidentally exaggerated. The floods of 1975 and 1979 were the worst in 70 years, not a century.

Larv

Posted May 11, 2007 at 11:09 am

If they had 2 million people they couldn’t feed, why is it an issue if they killed some of them before they starved?

Honestly, if the answer isn’t obvious to you, I don’t know what to say. You really should put down the mouse and slowly step away from the blog. This is the worst sort of apologetics, and for one of the worst regimes in history. Do you really believe that there is no moral difference between having many of your citizens starve and simply preemptively smashing their heads in with rifle butts?

Donald Johnson

Posted May 11, 2007 at 11:11 am

“f they had 2 million people they couldn’t feed, why is it an issue if they killed some of them before they starved?

The floods of 1975 and 1978 hurt them a lot, of course. Worst floods in a century. Probably not expected.

Apparently the khmer rouge tried to stockpile food to prepare for a vietnamese invasion, and the stockpiled food could have saved some people. But then, the invasion came on schedule. Would they have done better to feed more people and arrange an orderly surrender? Would that have worked out well?

Their ideology may have played a part. They believed in being self-reliant and in depending strongly on agriculture with minimal industry. They believed in collective farming. We don’t believe that’s an efficient way to grow food. But everybody’s wrong beliefs bite them.

If you were in their place, what would you do?”

Beg for help. Apparently you support genocide in those circumstances. Go to hell.

john miller

Posted May 11, 2007 at 11:42 am

I was going to support J Thomas for a while, mainly in pointing out that he had never really condoned the genocide. But then, apparently he did. And like Donald, I would have gone wherever I had to and gotten down on my knees and begged.

Plus, I would like some evidence that supports his assumption that the genocide occured in a response to food shortages. Earlier in the thread he talked about Germany’s plans for food accumulation which pointed out that there may be starvation on a large scale. However, that was starvation in Russia of the Russians.

There was no concentrated genocide in order to avoid starvation.

The logical fallacy is that he/she is taking events that occured at the same time, and creatign a causality.

I don’t have the time to investigate, but I believe that we could find times of starvation without massive genocide.

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 2:24 pm

John Miller, at the time the germans, french, danish, swiss etc were under rationing. None of them were particularly starving yet, but the possibility was there if the food supply got cut.

Germany and russia were not only in a war but they were continuing an arms race, which germany was losing. The germans couldn’t have put off their attack a lot longer and still had a decent chance to win, and their only chance to win involved capturing russian factories faster than the russians could move them east. They had to take a lot of russian food to continue the war — the alternative was defeat. They wouldn’t necessarily starve from not taking the russian food. But they starved the last time they were defeated. And to avoid defeat they needed to starve tens of millions of slavs.

After they took the 1942 food germany was the best nourished nation in europe, for awhile. But it didn’t last.

Germany did starve a little after 1945, though we had no intention of it. There just wasn’t enough food being produced for the survivors, and the germans were among the last in line to get it.

I believe that we could find times of starvation without massive genocide.

Probably so. Somalia could be an example. Or Rwanda. Biafra. Fukien province in china. (China had droughts and typhoons in 1960 and food production was down. Rather than cut rations across the country they apparently chose to let this disloyal province starve, they shipped food *out* of it and did not ship any in. No racial or political distinctions among the starvers or the starved, so no genocide.)

I believe you won’t find many examples of massive genocide without starvation, though.

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 3:41 pm

This is the worst sort of apologetics, and for one of the worst regimes in history. Do you really believe that there is no moral difference between having many of your citizens starve and simply preemptively smashing their heads in with rifle butts?

I keep getting this sort of emotional reaction and I don’t understand it. It’s like you guys are still caught up in figuring out who to blame. I would have thought WWI would have taught you better.

Sometimes wars start out as stately minuets where generals play for position and the losers surrender with few casualties and life goes on pretty much as before. But sometimes things escalate out of control, and terrible things are done by all participants, and then some of the losers are singled out for war crimes trials. And what good does it do?

We would not have put up with the Treaty of Versailles except we agreed the germans were the bad guys who deserved it. And the result was they were driven crazy by their grievances and followed Hitler. Could the german population have begged for mercy from the soviets, after their previous experience with begging for mercy?

We wanted somebody to blame for our defeat in vietnam. We blamed the north vietnamese and the cambodians, and we did whatever we could to punish them. We used the cambodian genocide as proof that we were right to occupy vietnam and bomb cambodia etc.

What does all this righteousness get us? Is there any chance that our moral stands against badguys will get them to act nice?

Do we get anything out of pretending that the badguys are utterly morally inferior to us, beyond feeling superior?

When we pretend that their choices are something we ourselves would never do, what does it get us but the chance to do more blame? When you get right down to it, aren’t we all victims and the victims of victims recursively and reciprocally?

Bruce Baugh

Posted May 11, 2007 at 5:13 pm

J: What would you expect someone to do in the situation as you’ve constructed it? Whatever it takes not to commit genocide. Change plans. Stretch rationing. Force elites to give up their special hoards. Abandon a war front. Surrender. Anything to avoid genocide. And I can’t see that any other response deserves any consideration at all. Those who will commit mass murder for the sake of their pet schemes are villains.

The reason you get this hostility is that your posts continue to sound like you regard genocide as a reasonable response to tough circumstances, and you keep ducking discussion of the extent to which tyrants create the conditions in the first place.

Germany did starve a little after 1945, though we had no intention of it. There just wasn’t enough food being produced for the survivors, and the germans were among the last in line to get it.

My MIL worked for the British intelligence and was in Germany after the war because she was fluent in German. She still tells stories about how it was strictly forbidden to give any food to the Germans, and how she whould try to bypass those laws to give cans of condensed milk to the mothers with children because she refused to be responsible for preventable deaths.

imo, only if you are trying to get out of an unanesthesized root canal…

Donald Johnson

Posted May 11, 2007 at 11:39 pm

As a participant, I’d say no. I did tell someone to go someplace unpleasant (hell, actually) so you might want to issue me a warning about posting rules, which I’ll take to heart. Consider it done and don’t waste your time.

She still tells stories about how it was strictly forbidden to give any food to the Germans

Which is why we very sensibly incinerated so many German civilians — we anticipated the food shortage at the end of the war, thus we figured better to kill as many as possible *before* then so there would be fewer mouths to feed then.

[/J Thomas]

J Thomas

Posted May 11, 2007 at 11:46 pm

“Could the german population have begged for mercy from the soviets?”

Well, had they NOT INVADED RUSSIA, then I daresay the necessity wouldn’t have arisen.

You are assuming the russians wouldn’t have invaded germany. It’s possible they would not have — if the japanese had attacked siberia instead of striking at the USA then the eastern russian forces would have stayed east until the japanese threat was handled, and maybe they’d have felt the necessity to occupy china, and they might not have gotten around to taking western europe for decades. But what are the chances? Japan couldn’t really afford to strike at russia. Siberia didn’t have the resources they needed. They had to take the british and dutch colonies, and that meant they had to persuade the US Navy not to intervene so they had to take the philippines, and starting a war with russia too just wasn’t going to happen.

So it was inevitable that russia would attack by spring of 1943 at the latest, and germany couldn’t win a defensive war.

By taking the fight to the enemy with a surprise attack they captured well over a million russian soldiers, they destroyed a whole lot of russian factories and infrastructure, they denied lots of resources to the russian economy and they killed over 20 million russian civilians who would otherwise have aided the russian war effort. If they had managed to take the caucasus oilfields, or if they had taken enough russian industry — not far east of Moscow — they might have done much better than they did.

It’s easy to argue in hindsight that they couldn’t have won so they shouldn’t have tried. But that’s hindsight. They thought they had a fighting chance. You can argue that they were wrong to kill a whole lot of their enemies instead of surrendering — but what kind of person would surrender to *Stalin* when there was an alternative?

You say genocide is so evil — it wasn’t so many years later that we were sending our bombers right up near the soviet border and then at the last minute we’d give them the order to come home instead of nuking the russian cities their orders said to nuke. We were all set to do genocide by *accident*. And in our decades of nuclear “brinksmanship” we weren’t bluffing. Our people were carefully trained to follow their orderes even when it meant, well, genocide. In 1973 when we told the russians to back off from supplying egypt and syria enough for a stalemate, when we threatened to kill everybody in the world if they didn’t let israel have the victory, we weren’t bluffing. We’d have done it except the russians backed down.

You can say we were right or wrong, but our reasoning was the same as the nazis — we were not willing to surrender to the USSR, even if the alternative was hundreds of millions of their citizens and our citizens died in the first two weeks. We were not even willing to let russian client states get a stalemate in a war with israel, we’d kill everybody in the world first.

We risked killing everybody in the world — not a paltry 30 million people. And it would have been so easy to do it your way and just surrender to the USSR and let them occupy us. No chance at all that we’d do genocide then. But we didn’t have the gumption to do the right thing. Instead we fought the cold war, we spent over a trillion dollars that could have gone to the third world, or to research, or to improving the civilian economy, or any productive thing we might have imagined. We could have done wonderful things with that money instead of preparing for a genocidal war that luckily never came — provided the russians let us. But of course if we surrendered it wouldn’t be our choice what to do with the money we saved by not militarising. It would be their choice.

Rather than let the russians collectivize our agriculture and nationalise our industry, rather than let them give us socialised medicine and one-party government etc, our government chose to see us all dead if that’s what it took to stop them. And a lot of our public agreed.

You’re welcome to think that the people who actually got around to doing a little genocide were horrible monsters who thought in alien ways we can’t possibly understand. But it isn’t true.

You’re welcome to think that the people who actually got around to doing a little genocide were horrible monsters who thought in alien ways we can’t possibly understand.

Straw man. Who said that? They were “evil.” What’s hard about that concept?

You are assuming the russians wouldn’t have invaded germany.

Why, yes, I am — because Russia had no plans to invade Germany in the foreseeable future.

So it was inevitable that russia would attack by spring of 1943 at the latest

That word “so,” I don’t think it means what you think it means. Really, where are you getting this stuff?

May I suggest you lay off the internet nutjobbery for a while and go get some actual books? Pick up David Glantz for instance, who has forgotten more from the Soviet military archives than any of us will ever know.

and they killed over 20 million russian civilians who would otherwise have aided the russian war effort

Wow. Just “wow.” Here are pix of some of those 20 million. Don’t miss the 2-year-old girl in the middle pic.

J Thomas

Posted May 12, 2007 at 12:08 am

we very sensibly incinerated so many German civilians — we anticipated the food shortage at the end of the war, thus we figured better to kill as many as possible *before* then so there would be fewer mouths to feed then.

Anderson, I strongly doubt that. I don’t think the people who were thinking about the future occupation had much if any input into the bombing missions.

What we said we were doing was going after industries that supplied the german military. But our bombing methods were mostly ineffective. I had an old math teacher who had been a tail gunner in the war and who knew a whole lot about it. He thought there were only a couple of bombing missions that mattered, apart from the oil. One was an attack that destroyed a dam in the Ruhr, where they used a special aiming method to get a single bomb at precisely the right place on the dam. The other was an attack on a ball bearing factory. The rest were mostly ineffective. They couldn’t hit the factories well enough. They couldn’t even hit the workers’ residences well enough. They mostly bombed random civilians and pastures by accident. But they tried to aim for vital war industries.

The few exceptions like Dresden they wanted to disperse the german antiaircraft effort. If the germans knew they were only going to go after specific targets, then the germans could concentrate their defenses around those targets. If they had to defend all their cities they couldn’t do it as well. And the USAAF hadn’t figured out how to make firestorms reliably, and they wanted to practice. But the germans saw they couldn’t protect everything so they protected their vital war industries, and we mostly didn’t keep going after the unprotected cities since it didn’t particularly help us win the war faster.

In hindsight we realised the strategic bombing campaign was mostly a waste. It was much easier to see that after we had nukes that the reasoning didn’t apply to.

There was some talk that terror bombing would reduce the enemy’s will to fight. But it didn’t seem to work that way. I think the way they thought of it was, if we’re willing to kill innocent women and children etc, what would we do after they surrender and mostly can’t stop us?

The same reasoning that tells us not to surrender to nazis or russians or for that matter muslim headchoppers, applies to them when we’re the ones doing atrocities.

J Thomas

Posted May 12, 2007 at 12:12 am

“So it was inevitable that russia would attack by spring of 1943 at the latest”

That word “so,” I don’t think it means what you think it means. Really, where are you getting this stuff?

I see that I worded that poorly. The germans thought it was inevitable. They were losing the arms race, so each year the war was delayed was a year that made them weaker relative to the USSR.

I don’t say it was actually inevitable, since Stalin got to make choices and he could choose not to even if it looked like the obvious best alternative.

urban coyote

Posted May 12, 2007 at 2:09 am

Russell: There are lots and lots of reasons why the US was able to mobilize quickly for war. Maybe the “sound fiscal policies” of the 20’s were part of it, but anyone I know who lived through the 30’s would find the juxtaposition of the phrases “sound fiscal policy” and “the 20’s” to be kind of a cruel joke.

Response: You're clearly missing the point. Despite the length and depth of the depression, the dollar remained sound throughout the decade and interest rates, for example, stayed low. Compare that to the recessions of 1975 or 1982, for example, when deficits popped sharply upward during economic reversals. When WW2 came to the US in the early 40's, most people remembered that the last time things were good (the 20's), the debt was paid down. That was absolutely critical to winning the war, perhaps the single most important factor. I'm strongly suggesting that paying down the federal debt in good times is something we need to do at least once every 60 years for our own defense.

Anarch quoted me saying: I don't argue that Hitler used socialism as a political prop and foil to himself become a dictator. The "real" socialists who were his political and party allies in the 1920's were minimized or murdered early on.
Then added: Which is to say, they weren’t socialist at all. Well done.

Response. Terrible. Terrible. Anarch, there's a professor at Northwestern named David Zarefsky. He teaches Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning. There are rules for evidence. The rules are there because argumentation is a CONTRACT between parties to arrive at the truth. That's not what you're doing. You're cheating.

Does Stalin's henchmen's murder of Trotsky make Trotsky the real communist and Stalin the impostor? No, people struggling for power often get into blood feuds. The politburo in 1953 after Stalin's death is an example.
That Hitler killed a doctrinaire socialist ally does not kick him out of the socialist club.

The socialist agenda you mention is a fair description of most of what Hitler was doing IN PEACETIME before things started heating up in 1939 â€“ including winning honest elections in 1933 and 1938.

You say, "Nazism was a racist, nationalist ideology organized along the lines of the Fuhrerprinzip: all power derived from a strong leader, each of whom was subject to a still-higher leader, culminating in the Fuhrer. " Wrong. Hitler would say, and did say, that the people are the Germanic god, and that he was their fairly elected Fuhrer dedicated to reclaiming their glory! He didn't insult his base until the war was lost ("Germany is not worthy of me!" he bleated in February, 1945).

Like socialism in a crisis, Hitler was only, reluctantly, taking temporary powers until things were set right -that was the postureâ€”and it worked to get him elected again. He was very deft and patient in establishing his classes of citizenship.

Like any country in a crisis, Hitler used nationalism in preparation for war and to spy on his own people. The Soviets did this constantly. The Chinese are still doing this. The satellite states all did it. I don't think anyone has done it better than Castro, with an intelligence agent on every block. Specifically, this internal tyranny is an apt and appropriate application of the socialist notion that, "proletariat working communally towards a common good.' There's no property and no personal ambitions, so no one should be afraid of being spied on. The internal security apparatus of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Communist China were nearly identical and based on this interpretation of the communal nature of life. In this sense, Hitler is in the mainstream and Venezuela, today, is lax and far from true socialism and courting the bourgeoisie.

Hitler added to socialism a specific definition of "the people" that was racist and exclusive (and self-contradictory) as well as a xenophobic explanation for Germany's loss of the Great War (which ultimately would be corrected by "the people" being given more living space, as promised in Mien Kampf).

Anarch quoted me saying: The most telling similarity of all is that both Lenin and Hitler talked as collectivists in order to arrogate absolute power to themselves.

Then said: No they didn’t. Lenin talked of himself as a collectivist; Hitler talked about himself as Fuhrer.

Response: Hitler also talked about himself as completely on of the German people ("I am the German people!") and in his speeches, he specifically identified himself with the audience in a personal, familial manner. This was, in fact his greatest strength, an ability to speak as one of them, to get the audience to identify with him, calling them and himself to destiny. The social programs and youth programs and educational radio programs were consistent with socialism. His concern with hearth and home, having enough butter, looking out for women and what they needed as mothers, as examples, was socialistic. He never did call them out of the home for the war.

He won a coalition chancellorship following honest elections and cooperated with the socialist factions â€“ as long as they were supine.

Hitler grafted this socialistic concern for the people together with fascism. If you take your definition of socialism, make some exceptions for the industries that supported him in the twenties, redefine citizenship in a xenophobic manner, then add the distinguishing characteristics of fascism (Humberto Eco has a list of 14 of these, an excellent summaryâ€”from New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, reprinted in the Nov-Dec 1995 Utne Reader), then you've got Hitler through about 1938. And make no mistake, the German people loved Hitler, absolutely loved him.

It's not pure socialism, it wasn't the only German socialism, but it was in the arena and swallowing the other socialists and the liberals, through a special combination of intellectual amalgamation and naked fear tactics. He wasn't a very good socialist? Well, he wasn't perfectly doctrinaire. He wasn't a very good fascist, either! Franco stayed I power in Spain from 1939 to his death from natural causes 1975.

Your defense of socialism as something entirely separate from Hitler fails the rules for logical argumentation. You wrongly say that socialism was only in the title of the party and not in the policies. You wrongly say that Hitler only talked about himself as a leader (when he could be very modest and pious, almost sexually offering himself to his audience). And you say that socialism has no intersection with nationalism, though any nation, including a socialist one, will bray nationalistically if it is in trouble (USSR, PRC, Cuba, modern Venezuela) or, in Hitler's case, bray while asking for trouble.

I'm tempted to infer that socialism has, for some, religious overtones. Is it a sacred thing for some of you? No one that I know from the center, center-right or right has any difficulty at all seeing Hitler as an orator of great acting talent amalgamating socialism and fascism. Detached from ideological hypnotism about socialism, non-leftists have no magic reverence for the concept. Many of us see any form of overcentralization of power, including the ideal socialism Anarch describes, as a scheme with a needlessly high potential of devolving into tyranny, viz., "Power corruptsâ€¦" and textbook socialism concentrates power. Nazi Germany, the USSR Cuba and the PRC all developed gulags, the ultimate signature of a police state. My guess is that Hitler, though not a trained intellectual or administrator, guessed correctly about that concentration of power and adopted what he could; after all, he started out as a spy on the party for the German Army.

In this sense, yes, Hitler is different indeed, in that he didn't worship socialism. He worshipped war ("â€¦almost a religion of war" Kipling said I his last days). "Only Hitler is like Hitler," to quote Jon Stewart.

I haven't brought this up before â€“ it's a long, dull, boring story that is as absurd and tragicomic as a Pirandello play â€“ I haven't studied it thoroughly the way I have Shakespeare or non-profit-tax law â€“ but I advise you to look at what the socialistic factions THEMSELVES were saying to each other while Hitler was gaining power in the 1930's. Delving into that kinda proves my point. The rest of this post is a quote about it:

"â€¦.If it is possible to assign a date to the moment when European social democracy and European communism became lethal antagonists, then 14 July 1927 is a date worth bearing in mind. On that day the powerful social democrats of Vienna were confronted by an open challenge from the clerical right-wing regime. A contemptuously rigged jury had acquitted those who had openly lynched three social democrats in the town of Schattendorf. Furious workers' leaders came to the offices of the Socialist Party, demanding action. They wanted to see the great Otto Bauer. They were told the protest should be verbal only. As Ernst Fischer, who was present at the meeting, records the argument in his book An Opposing Man, the militants from the power stations and the factories were instructed: â€˜One can't demonstrate against a verdict returned by a juryâ€¦ Trial by jury is a great democratic achievement. Even if the jury is mistaken, you can't come out into the streets.' The next day, the workers of Vienna took to the streets anyway, and were fired on by the Austrian mounted police.
"The failure of social democracy to challenge authority and legality on this and many other occasions meant that the pre-fascist right, which was cynical about its â€˜own' legal norms, had an easy time crushing Vienna's poor for good in the bloodbath of February, 1934. (It was these events, brilliantly chronicled by Fischer, that led Elias Canetti to start thinking about crowds and power, and also let Kim Philby to join the Communist Party.) Fischer and many like him were so disgusted by the failure of nerve shown by Austrian and German reformists that when they fled, they fled to Moscow. They based their newfound Communism on the idea â€“vividly illustrated by experience and reality â€“ that â€˜bourgeois' freedom was a sham and a snare. This bifurcation of the European left â€“between those who cared for democratic properties no matter what and those who saw them as an ideological construct â€“led to disasters from which the Continent has never recovered. Even Fischer, by then a devout Stalinist, became a little upset after a talk he gave to the German and Austrian exiles in Moscow, defending the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The Nazis had invaded France, and he was in the room when â€˜suddenly the door flew open and a German Communist rushed in: "We've taken Paris!"' Dummkopf. How terrifying when the lessons of dogma are learned too well. One of the conformists at the meeting where Fischer spoke was Wilhelm Pieck, later President of the â€˜German Democratic Republic.' The German Communists managed to outlive Hitler, though not to live down their compromises with him, and when they came home it was as clients of the Red Army."

–The Cunning of History [error: published in The Nation in November, 1989, and reprinted with For the Sake of Argument], by Christopher Hitchens, ppg. 136-7

Anarch

Posted May 12, 2007 at 4:13 am

Terrible. Terrible. Anarch, there's a professor at Northwestern named David Zarefsky. He teaches Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning.

And I’m a professional logician. I think I know what I’m doing here.

[BTW, unless you happen to be David Zarefsky, so fnording what? There are literally thousands of professors all over the world who teach similar things. Why on earth would you name-drop him only to drop him unceremoniously one sentence later?]

Does Stalin's henchmen's murder of Trotsky make Trotsky the real communist and Stalin the impostor?

No, but Stalin didn’t claim he was anti-Communist and that by killing Trotsky he was destroying Bolshevism. Unlike Hitler, which was the implied comparison.

Wrong. Hitler would say, and did say, that the people are the Germanic god, and that he was their fairly elected Fuhrer dedicated to reclaiming their glory!

Yes, he did say that. And as far as what he actually did, he followed the Fuhrerprinzip, unless you’re really trying to argue that the Nazi Party was internally run on some kind of electoral system.

What’s more, Hitler was very explicit about his adherence to the Fuhrerprinzip. Consider his execution of the Beer Hall Putsch; consider Mein Kampf; consider his discourse with Goebbels in 1926; consider his speech after the Night Of The Long Knives; hell, consider damn near everything he ever talked about. He personally was going to lead the glorious German people to victory. First among equals be damned, he was first — and foremost.

The socialist agenda you mention is a fair description of most of what Hitler was doing IN PEACETIME before things started heating up in 1939 â€“ including winning honest elections in 1933 and 1938.

Since I never mentioned a socialist agenda, I’m at a loss. In fact, I explicitly said that Hitler did not have a socialist agenda, that his sole communitarian impulses sprang from his notion of volk. I explicitly said that your illustrations of “socialism” were nothing of the sort. Please do me the courtesy of responding to what I actually wrote.

As for the “honest” elections of 1933 and 1938… you might conceivably make a case for the 1933 election being honest — you’d be wrong, but you could make a case for it — but the 1938 one? Are you nuts? It was a plebiscite held in Austria after the Anschluss and, while I don’t doubt for a moment that the Nazis commanded a significant majority, a) they had just invaded invaded Austria two days before after a’) declaring the real plebiscite would not be accepted by Germany, b) their allies had spent months fomenting violence and subverting the authority of the Austrian Chancellory, c) the Austrian Nazis lied about pro-German riots to garner additional sympathy, yet d) you think that the 99.34% approval in the plebiscite was honest?

Oy.

[Although it does give me the opportunity to say one of my favorite names in all history: Seyss-Inquart, the head of the Austrian Nazi Party. It's fun to say, try it!]

Like socialism in a crisis, Hitler was only, reluctantly, taking temporary powers until things were set right -that was the postureâ€”and it worked to get him elected again. He was very deft and patient in establishing his classes of citizenship.

The hell? Hitler was never elected in any meaningful sense of the word, let alone twice. He was given backdoor access to the chancellory by Franz von Papen and Kurt Schleicher, who should by rights be keeping Brutus and Cassius company down in Cocytus. He was appointed by President Hindenburg — and he was appointed (after conniving by Schleicher and von Papen) because the Nazis had started to fail in the polls (having lost some 40-odd seats in the November 1932 election). It’s true that the Nazis did then command a significant plurality in 1933 — though not a majority, something Hitler never really forgave — but the Nazis had spent some two months terrorizing the crap out of their left-wing opposition and cajoling the centrist parties and leveraging the Reichstag Fire for all it was worth. After the Enabling Act, all bets were off.

On which note: Hitler didn’t “reluctantly tak[e] temporary powers”, he rammed the Enabling Act through the Reichstag within his first hundred days in office, seducing the Catholics with promises of recognition, seducing the middle class types with promises of civil liberties, and beating the crap out of the socialist/KPD opposition. There was nothing “reluctant” about it.

If you take your definition of socialism, make some exceptions for the industries that supported him in the twenties, redefine citizenship in a xenophobic manner, then add the distinguishing characteristics of fascism… then you've got Hitler through about 1938.

And if my Aunt Sally had balls, she’d be my Uncle Jake. Which is to say: if you change everything about Hitler then yes, he could end up a socialist. Or a ballerina. It’s hard to say.

Your defense of socialism as something entirely separate from Hitler fails the rules for logical argumentation.

Speaking as a professional logician: no, it doesn’t. It might be incorrect; it’s not invalid.

You wrongly say that socialism was only in the title of the party and not in the policies.

Speaking of argumentative fouls: declarative statements do not an argument make. You still haven’t offered a scrap of substantive evidence that he was a socialist by any conventional sense of the word. I’ve offered substantial evidence that he wasn’t. This is not a parity.

[I'm sure he was a socialist by the standards of the Right, but then I'm sure that damn near everyone would be a socialist if those standards were uniformly applied.]

You wrongly say that Hitler only talked about himself as a leader (when he could be very modest and pious, almost sexually offering himself to his audience).

Yes, he could, on occasion. And those occasions were almost invariably describing himself as a unifying figure — Christ-like at times, Wotan-like at others — the focus of all German history. The leader whom others should, and would, follow. There were certainly times when Hitler feigned reluctance towards his destiny — though not the passage of the Enabling Act, your claims above notwithstanding — but they were always, always, always presented in a context that required his audience to think of him as a leader. He never once allowed anyone to think otherwise, as the Strasser brothers (amongst others) found to their cost.

And you say that socialism has no intersection with nationalism, though any nation, including a socialist one, will bray nationalistically if it is in trouble (USSR, PRC, Cuba, modern Venezuela) or, in Hitler's case, bray while asking for trouble.

I didn’t say that it has no intersection with nationalism. I said that socialism is explicitly universalist, which it is, although obviously any defined nation-state is going to have some nationalist elements within it. I also said that Nazism was explicitly anti-socialist, which it was, and that Nazism had no meaningful intersection with socialism. Once again, you’ve completely failed to answer our earlier questions while presuming (incorrectly again) us to have said something we have not.

I’ll add, since you raised the subject, that many dictatorships (regardless of ostensible political bent) end up appealing to a kind of de facto nationalism to hold their nation-state together, but adopting nationalism through expediency and believing in it from first principles are two completely different things.* Cults of Personality muddy the waters still further but — contrary to your implied assertion — these aren’t characteristic of socialism, they’re characteristics of dictatorships.

* Modern China is IMO a stand-out exception to this, with the double whammy of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square massacre destroying what legitimacy the CCP had as a people’s movement, resulting in the hypernationalist Communist Party we know and love today.

Is it a sacred thing for some of you?

Is it an imperative that you sanctimoniously impugn people’s characters?

No one that I know from the center, center-right or right has any difficulty at all seeing Hitler as an orator of great acting talent amalgamating socialism and fascism.

Congratulations. They’re still wrong.

[And fwiw, AFAICT your definition of "center" is way to the right of most other people's. Waaaaaay to the right.]

but I advise you to look at what the socialistic factions THEMSELVES were saying to each other while Hitler was gaining power in the 1930's. Delving into that kinda proves my point.

But regardless: bored now. I have better things to do than argue with someone out of his depth. Drop me a line if you actually respond to the arguments I’m making, otherwise I’ll see you in the funny papers.

Phil

Posted May 12, 2007 at 7:45 am

Since I didn’t, in the first 50 words, see UC come up with a single citation to support his assertion that “many” here deny that socialists can be nationalist or racist, I didn’t bother reading the rest of his latest missive; and judging by Anarch’s response, I did the right thing.

I had an old math teacher who had been a tail gunner in the war and who knew a whole lot about it. He thought there were only a couple of bombing missions that mattered, apart from the oil. One was an attack that destroyed a dam in the Ruhr, where they used a special aiming method to get a single bomb at precisely the right place on the dam.

If by “special aiming method” you mean “special bomb.” There was a rather famous movie about it and everything.

Slartibartfast

Posted May 12, 2007 at 10:55 am

As far as the Nazism/socialism bit goes, it seems to me that Nazism was nearly the opposite of any sort of collectivist philosophy, while socialism is pretty far along the collectivist axis. Nazism was for state-controlled…well, everything, but there was no consensus as such.

hilzoy

Posted May 12, 2007 at 12:00 pm

I just reread it. I will never disregard LJ’s advice again. (Never? Well, hardly ever…)

I admire Anarch’s patience, because there is a lot of incoherent rambling in UC’s comments.

But I think the discussion J. Thomas tries to have (if I interpret correctly) has worthy pieces. How do you distinguish between the strategies when killing is the goal and strategies when killing is an ‘unfortunate side effect’. Are both as bad?

Wasn’t part of Hannah Arends banality of evil that most evil isn’t the goal, but caused by the indifference to side effects? (has been years since I read that, so I might remember it all wrong)

Dutch,
I’m still basking in the warmth of hilzoy’s comment. A comment like that is a joy forever…

However, while the discussion of what strategies are appropriate in total war, the approach taken is rather disingenuous, imo, mixing the generalities of such a question to the particular case of Pol Pot or the Holocaust. The whole notion of what someone would do if they were Pol Pot is one that is meaningless because if someone were Pol Pot, they wouldn’t be themselves. Unless you want to explain precisely what attributes of Pol Pot that you have to take on, and which of your own attributes you get to keep, you’ve got a conversation that may look coherent, but really doesn’t explain anything. Yet the suggestion is continually made that we would do the same thing if we were Pol Pot, suggesting that we are hypocritical because we can’t admit it. Discussing a causality of blame is important, but the way it has been done in this thread is to simply invite confusion.

I admire Anarch’s patience, because there is a lot of incoherent rambling in UC’s comments.

Anarch has truly gone above and beyond the call on this thread.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 12, 2007 at 10:39 pm

Dutchmarbel–there was the potential for an interesting discussion over some of JThomas’s points, but it got derailed when he acted as if the total number of people who died in Cambodia 1975-1978 was a predetermined number, one that couldn’t be altered, so hey, why not murder them instead? He meant to challenge our moral complacency, which is a worthwhile thing to do, but starting out from a position where you defend genocide generally makes people uninterested in your other moral claims.

How do you distinguish between the strategies when killing is the goal and strategies when killing is an ‘unfortunate side effect’.

Well, it doesn’t help to be either ignorant or dishonest about the distinction, such as saying that the Nazis didn’t really *seek* the deaths of millions of Jews and Russians (incl. “Russian Jews”). That makes it much more difficult to take one seriously.

–Agreed that Anarch’s patience is a wonder; I had to simply ignore the Coyote’s comments, as Thomas’s were enough to set my snark boiling.

Anarch

Posted May 13, 2007 at 3:17 am

:)

J Thomas

Posted May 13, 2007 at 9:41 am

The whole notion of what someone would do if they were Pol Pot is one that is meaningless because if someone were Pol Pot, they wouldn’t be themselves.

Good point, LP. Let me try to state it better.

I claim that the fundamental choice in these cases is between doing the best you can, versus abdicating and letting somebody else handle it.

If you abdicate then there’s a reasonable chance the next guy in line wouldn’t do as well as you would. You ought to abdicate if you think he’d do better. Pol Pot had the choice to abdicate to whoever would run the khmer rouge after him (which I’m guessing would probably not be an improvement. And for all we know somebody looked it over and abdicated to him. If your contribution to improving the situation is only that they use a different name for the official mass murderer, what good is that?) Or he could have tried to arrange a khmer rouge surrender to the USA, on the assumption that we might then feed the nation. Could he have pulled that off? Or would it have just gotten him killed? What’s the chance it would have worked? If he got the offer to us soon enough, we’d still have the food we collected for Lon Nol. Did they have the communications to send us an offer? There were no such communicastion channels available by the time of the Mayaguez incident. Would we have responded? We were *looking* for a genocide to blame on our withdrawal.

Or he could have surrendered to their old enemies, the vietnamese. The ones who took cambodian rice when they needed it to fight their own war and left the cambodians to starve.

There might have been a chance somewhere like that, assuming he could get the khmer rouge turned around and ready to surrender so their cambodian enemies might be fed.

Barring that, the best he could do was to put those people to work growing food. That minimised the deaths. And of course he had to put down rebellions — what unpopular government doesn’t? Get a place without enough food and an active civil war going and it will be worse than a place without enough food. The war would keep people from growing crops, so more would starve — unless enough were violently killed that there was accidentally enough food for the survivors.

Barring a successful khmer rouge surrender to someone who’d actually feed cambodia, something along the lines of what happened was probably about the best they could do. I don’t say they couldn’t have done better. More effort making farming handtools quicker might have resulted in more crops the first year. Less us-and-them attitude might have gotten more cooperation from the victims. (But that’s hard to arrange. Even in UN refugee camps there’s a very clear distinction between the professional staff and their victims.) Perhaps there were incidents that could have been prevented that led to the vietnamese invasion — but more likely that invasion was pretty much inevitable. Neither vietnam nor thailand wanted cambodian refugees and both were ready for vigorous efforts to stop them. Invading cambodia was effective at getting the cambodians out of vietnam.

When the best you can do still results in maybe 1/7 of your population dying, it’s easy to get a little callous. Try to make sure that 1/7 is somebody other than the people you care about.

I don’t claim it isn’t evil. I claim it’s something that practicaly anybody can fall into, if they don’t give up entirely.

I recall the scene in The Killing Fields where the senior KR leader, after entrusting his son to Dith Pran, goes to confront the others, who immediately shoot him (I think he says something like ‘I must do what I can’ though I can’t find the script online). Perhaps he shouldn’t have ‘abdicated’ his life, as the next person was crueler and would do worse. But if enough people were to choose such a path, I think surely things would have changed.

You may claim Haing Ngor, who played Dith Pran, was, after having survived 3 years of torture by the Khmer Rouge and survived only because he denied his post KR identity of being a doctor (and in what universe would be doing the best that you could do involve trying to completely eliminate your country’s educated class?), was murdered by gang members not because of politics, but because they demanded a locket that contained a picture of his dead wife, a locket that he refused to give up. In your logic, Ngor was a fool, as he should have just given up the locket, in mine, there are certain things you don’t give up and certain lines you don’t cross, even if crossing those lines might mean a better situation. Because if enough people accept that line, then the power shifts to them.

J Thomas

Posted May 13, 2007 at 10:39 am

When the subjects under discussion are Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk, I’m not sure “left” and “right” are useful categories.

As far as the Nazism/socialism bit goes, it seems to me that Nazism was nearly the opposite of any sort of collectivist philosophy, while socialism is pretty far along the collectivist axis. Nazism was for state-controlled…well, everything, but there was no consensus as such.

I tend to agree with both of these, particularly the first one.

The way my grade-school encyclopedia explained it, the nazis let people keep their property including factories etc, and they could even keep the profits, but the nazis decided what would be produced and how much it would cost. In principle just as much control as the communists, but they let capitalists keep collecting dividends etc rather than kill them.

I read the claim that the nazis didn’t actually mobilise for total war as well as a number of other countries did. Like, the claim was that they let a lot of lady’s maids stay lady’s maids when they could have put them to work in factories etc. Cultural factors. People may take official positions from ideology but the cultures they grew up with interfere in unexpected ways.

The nazis certainly weren’t socialists by socialist standards any more than New Deal democrats were socialist or dominicans were cathars. But in each case they tried to look enough like their enemies to defeat them while maintaining a different set of core values.

It looks to me like nazi core values involved nationalism and racism. They wanted revenge for the horrors germans had been dealt during and after WWI and they wanted to make sure it never happened again. They failed.

Bruce Baugh

Posted May 13, 2007 at 11:11 am

The Nazis didn’t mobilize for total war…

No, I really can’t contribute to this one.

J Thomas

Posted May 13, 2007 at 11:22 am

Perhaps he shouldn’t have ‘abdicated’ his life, as the next person was crueler and would do worse. But if enough people were to choose such a path, I think surely things would have changed.

You change things by persuading survivors. Sometimes that might happen from dying fast, other times better to stick around and persuade them. It depends.

and in what universe would be doing the best that you could do involve trying to completely eliminate your country’s educated class?

That one seems suboptimal to me, too. I can see them feeling like those people betrayed them, but it doesn’t make sense to choose them as the ones to die. Better to let some peasants die and keep some of the elite.

In your logic, Ngor was a fool, as he should have just given up the locket, in mine, there are certain things you don’t give up and certain lines you don’t cross, even if crossing those lines might mean a better situation. Because if enough people accept that line, then the power shifts to them.

It’s hard to second-guess a mugging. Guys with weapons do whatever they choose, and there’s no sure way to get out alive. He could have given it to them and been killed anyway. Or given sufficient language skill he could have told the right joke and they’d wave him on. Whatever he did, it didn’t work out well for him that time. I don’t know what I’d do and I can’t claim it would work.

He *might* have been in a situation where his choices were to do something that led to one or more deaths, versus surrender. He chose not to surrender and it turned out he died. It would seem to me to be more an example of what I’m talking about than otherwise.

J Thomas

Posted May 13, 2007 at 11:28 am

“How do you distinguish between the strategies when killing is the goal and strategies when killing is an ‘unfortunate side effect’.”

Well, it doesn’t help to be either ignorant or dishonest about the distinction, such as saying that the Nazis didn’t really *seek* the deaths of millions of Jews and Russians (incl. “Russian Jews”).

Who said that?

I claim that the nazis believed their choice was unconditional surrender or victory, and victory required that at minimum tens of millions of russians die. I certainly did not say that the germans chose not to kill them. They chose what they hoped was a chance for victory, instead of certain defeat. They chose not to depend on Stalin’s mercy.

And then the east germans had no choice but depend on that mercy, and a couple million of them disappeared before the occupation settled down enough to take a new census.

Donald J.: Yes, I agree that he tends to aim for provocation more than discourse but even a fool (and I don’t think he’s a fool) can bring up usefull points ;).

I like to be challenged in my thinking, in my automatic responses. Some of my beliefs are very dear and ultimately true for me (as in universal moral truths), but I cannot always describe why and I often find myself taking the easy way out. “But everybody knows X is bad, and you’d never do Y”.

I don’t think I could be Pol Pot. I am not polical or remorseless enough to even be a politician in our civil country ;). I do understand that there is a difference between the levels of evil, and those are not always expressed properly by the numbers of death caused.

IMHO you’re always responsible for the deaths you caused. But there may be mitigating circumstances. Most pro-Iraq war people justify the deaths caused by the US invasion by saying that the long term death toll under Saddam might have been higher. I disagree, but I understand their reasoning. Even here in ObWi we had people saying that the main reason to invade Iraq was oil, and as protection of American interests that was fine. Which means the 600.000 additional deaths were worth it. Is that more evil or less evil that people who say the Iraqi death toll is worth it because the aim was to protect them from worse fates? Or are those on par?

How ruthless can you be? How do you decide wether the cost in human life is worth it? Is there a difference in the worth of human life? Is an Iraqi worth less than an
American? Less than any American, no matter how rich they are? Why can Bush get away with New Orleans, if Americans are worth so much?

In my (Dutch) environment I see that the main ally evil has is indifference. People don’t care about the victims (’They’are killed, not ‘us’), or don’t want to think about consequences. We have killed hugh numbers of Indonesians in the 60’s, and nobody cared overly much. Were human lifes worth less? Where ‘their’ human lifes worth less? Was the ultimate goal important enough for everybody’s wellbeing to be worth it?

I read my grandmothers diaries. She wrote less in WW2, but what she wrote was not really about the war en even less about the Jews. I think the “let’s get their stuff to burn in the stove, they won’t come back anyway’ covers it. Now, my grandmother was definately not the nicest person I know, but she was not evil. She just was indifferent to the faith of people she didn’t care about.

John Thullen

Posted May 13, 2007 at 3:07 pm

Alternative lives:

Pol Pot, cutting short his stint at the Engineering School of Information Technology and Management in Paris because he found the subject matter tedious, decides to enroll at the French Culinary Institute to pursue his authentic passion.

After graduation, he is accepted for an apprenticeship with a renowned three-star chef in Lyon and advances rapidly to sous chef. His mentor bankrolls Chef Pot in a new venture, a little establishment where he begins experimenting with a menu of classic French food infused with Asian ingredients –the first known example of French-Asian fusion cuisine.

He is awarded three stars and after becoming an institution in France, he accepts an offer to head up the staff of a new establishment in New York. He builds the restaurant’s reputation to three-star status in the high-pressure New York scene of the 1960s and early 1970s , but then has one star removed by the New York Times food critic at the time, and descends into a deep and embittered depression and eventually a breakdown.

He rarely ventures out of his small New York apartment, becoming a recluse, though his name remains legend in culinary circles. He spends his days plotting vengeance on those who have wronged him, concocting a complicated scheme to murder, one by one and by gruesome means, all of the major food critics in New York, starting with those who wear eyeglasses.

Catching himself before this plan could become reality, he disappears into foody oblivion, working at a succession of New Jersey truck stops as a short-order cook, finally ending up at a low-end ski resort in New England, where he once again prepares a menu combining Asian and French influences fused with the fresh produce of the New England region.

He is rediscovered in the mid-1990s, now a man over 70, by Emeril Lagasse, who invites him on to his show on the Food Channel. They part amicably after disagreeing on the amount of cayenne papper one should use in a Cambodian pot au feu, and he now has two shows on the Food Channel and writes a column for Bon Appetite Magazine as he relaxes into his chef emeritus days.

Tune in next week when we trace the life of Joseph Stalin, whose existence turned on a single incident as a 30-something revolutionary when he spots by accident the beautiful 12-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia, who drops one white glove in his path as she enters the St Petersburg Opera House after catching his eye.

Weary from frequent exiles to Siberia, and like Dante seeking Beatrice, he succumbs to hopeless longing and turns inward, writing some bad poetry and spending his days outside the palace trying to catch a glimpse of his beloved.

We’ll also pay a visit to the young Adolf Hitler in Austria, who early on takes a shine to dogs, and studies biology and tries to eliminate the genetic aggressiveness out of the Doberman and German Shepherd breeds, eventually succeeding and opening a successful guide-dog training school for blind Hasidim.

Donald Johnson

Posted May 13, 2007 at 3:14 pm

Who amongst us wouldn’t murder food critics if we were chefs? Really, what choice would we have? Surrender to harsh reviews? Feh. That’s what’s so unrealistic about your alternate history, John. I expect better from the author of “Shopping in Indiana–The Lonely Commando’s Guidebook”.

Hartmut

Posted May 13, 2007 at 4:35 pm

Despie my decision to exit this thread I have to say that JT is indeed right that Hitler (and Germany) was not prepared for total war in 1939 and made attempts in that direction (without fully succeeding) only after the Wehrmacht got stopped at the gates of Moscow.
Blitzkrieg was not just a matter of superior tactics but of necessity because the German industry was not ready for any war of attrition (at least before Speer took over).
Hitler wanted his war in 1938 and was furious that Chamberlain spoilt it by caving in in Munich (and thus unwittingly preventing a military coup against Hitler btw). As in WW1 nobody was actually fully prepared and in both cases the German leadership took an opportunity to go to war while there seemed to be a chance of winning (and expecting it to slip away soon otherwise).
This does not mean that either war was in any way justified as premptive/preventive/whatever (and it were those *#%&$! Austrians that got us into both wars and afterwards pretended to be the innocent victims of Prussia [they still do and you will find a good deal more avowed Nazis down there than up here]).

J Thomas

Posted May 13, 2007 at 5:44 pm

there was the potential for an interesting discussion over some of JThomas’s points, but it got derailed when he acted as if the total number of people who died in Cambodia 1975-1978 was a predetermined number, one that couldn’t be altered, so hey, why not murder them instead?

That wasn’t it.

But look at the limiting factor. Just then, the limiting factor for survival was food. Anything you did to increase the food supply meant more lives saved, provided the food got distributed. Anything you did that wasted food meant more deaths.

And when the maximum food they could make wasn’t enough, it meant people were going to die. More people than there’s food for means some of them have to die when the food runs out. And one person who causes trouble now and gets killed now doesn’t eat his half-cup of rice a day, and that food can go to somebody who would have died otherwise. If there are a million people who’re going to starve regardless, then in a certain sense the first million people you kill don’t really count. And anybody you kill who’s reducing food production is likely to result in more people living.

I don’t claim that the khmer rouge were maximally efficient at saving lives. They did some things that were obvious mistakes — they didn’t have enough productive land, and they had very little transportation. They couldn’t grow enough food on the best land so they had to put new land into production, and they put people to work digging irrigation systems that washed away in the unprecedented monsoons. And if they could have persuaded the vietnamese not to invade they wouldn’t have needed to stockpile for the war. And — as usually happens — they split into classes, and the khmer rouge class was far too repressive with the war-slave class.

I claim that even with the best will in the world things would have gone rather much the way they did. They could have done worse, they might have done somewhat better, but it would have looked to the outside world like a genocide regardless. Meanwhile the USA was standing by with lots of rice that we absolutely would not give them — Congress had cut off support to the Lon Nol government, and no way were we going to give that support to genocidal communists. For that matter after they got overthrown it was by vietnamese-backed communists and we still did a lot to keep anybody we influenced from giving any aid to people they controlled.

We’d predicted a bloodbath and we weren’t going to be satisfied until we got one.

I claim that if you want to do good, you can do the most good if you pay attention to what good you can do and do it. Time you spend deciding who to blame it on is not particularly useful.

But time spent getting people who’re in the way out of the way might be very useful.

urban coyotes

Posted May 13, 2007 at 6:39 pm

[BTW, unless you happen to be David Zarefsky, so fnording what? There are literally thousands of professors all over the world who teach similar things. Why on earth would you name-drop him only to drop him unceremoniously one sentence later?]

Because the evidential matter you have presented is inadequate. It is impossible from your presentation to determine which governments do or not represent the idealistic definition of socialism you proposed. Because your defense is essential one for a religion rather than a search for truth. And because of the ad hominem nature of your chacaterizations of me. And because, thanks to Zarefsky et supra, we know now that the ancient Greek rhetoricians were right and that Plato and Descartes were wrong.

Remember that "socialism" from its inception through 1945 has been redefined since then, expecially by academia. You’re only going to listen to citations. So let's go to the belly of beast and see what Hitler himself had to say:

“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
–Adolf Hitler (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

"THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST -
THAT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE PROGRAM. BREAKING OF THE THRALDOM OF INTEREST – THAT IS THE KERNEL OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM. "
–Chapter 5 of Mein Kampf

"7. We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported from the Reich.

13. We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts).
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
15. We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, the immediate communalizing of big department stores, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that the utmost consideration shall be shown to all small traders in the placing of State and municiple orders.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land. *
18. We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.
20. The State must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education (with the aim of opening up to every able and hard-working German the possibility of higher education and of thus obtaining advancement). The curricula of all educational establishments must be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. The aim of the school must be to give the pupil, beginning with the first sign of intelligence, a grasp of the nation of the State (through the study of civic affairs). We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, at the expense of the State.
21. The State must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised by protecting mothers and infants, by prohibiting child labor, by promoting physical strength through legislation providing for compulsory gymnastics and sports, and by the extensive support of clubs engaged in the physical training of youth.
22. We demand the abolition of the mercenary army and the foundation of a people’s army.
25. To put the whole of this programme into effect, we demand the creation of a strong central state power for the Reich; the unconditional authority of the political central Parliament over the entire Reich and its organizations; and the formation of Corporations based on estate and occupation for the purpose of carrying out the general legislation passed by the Reich in the various German states. "

– 11 of the 25 points of the NSDAP Program, composed by Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler. They were publically presented on 24 February 1920

Analysis of business in Germany under Hitler:

"â€¦.No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual’s tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.
"What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party. "

–Ludwig von Mises, writing in 1944

Two quotes from Hitler himself (Hitler Speaks, 1940, by Hermann Rauchning):

“There is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will.”

Another quote from Hitler:

“Of what importance is all that, if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community. Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”

————

Many of his findings are astonishing. Perhaps for readers today the most astonishing of all is that “In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engels’ article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of the kind.” (The term “genocide” in Watson’s usage is not confined to the extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces also the liquidation of such other complete human categories as “enemies of the people” and “the Kulaks as a class.”)
–Prof. Antony Flew's review of historian George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism
—————————-
“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi” was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.”

–Tom Wolfe {From the essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” originally appearing in the June 2000 Harper’s Monthly and reprinted in Wolfe’s book Hooking Up}

urban coyote

Posted May 13, 2007 at 6:46 pm

Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian

A 1995 lecture at the Ludwig von Mises Institute By George Reisman [George Reisman, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics (Ret.) at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management in Los Angeles and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996)]

My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.

The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.

When one remembers that the word “Nazi” was an abbreviation for “der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei â€” in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party â€” Mises’s identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with “socialist” in its name to be but socialism?

Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed.

The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.

What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.

De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.

But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.

The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale.
Shortages, in turn, result in economic chaos. It’s not only that consumers who show up in stores early in the day are in a position to buy up all the stocks of goods and leave customers who arrive later, with nothing â€” a situation to which governments typically respond by imposing rationing. Shortages result in chaos throughout the economic system. They introduce randomness in the distribution of supplies between geographical areas, in the allocation of a factor of production among its different products, in the allocation of labor and capital among the different branches of the economic system.

In the face of the combination of price controls and shortages, the effect of a decrease in the supply of an item is not, as it would be in a free market, to raise its price and increase its profitability, thereby operating to stop the decrease in supply, or reverse it if it has gone too far. Price control prohibits the rise in price and thus the increase in profitability. At the same time, the shortages caused by price controls prevent increases in supply from reducing price and profitability. When there is a shortage, the effect of an increase in supply is merely a reduction in the severity of the shortage. Only when the shortage is totally eliminated does an increase in supply necessitate a decrease in price and bring about a decrease in profitability.

As a result, the combination of price controls and shortages makes possible random movements of supply without any effect on price and profitability. In this situation, the production of the most trivial and unimportant goods, even pet rocks, can be expanded at the expense of the production of the most urgently needed and important goods, such as life-saving medicines, with no effect on the price or profitability of either good. Price controls would prevent the production of the medicines from becoming more profitable as their supply decreased, while a shortage even of pet rocks prevented their production from becoming less profitable as their supply increased.

As Mises showed, to cope with such unintended effects of its price controls, the government must either abolish the price controls or add further measures, namely, precisely the control over what is produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it is distributed, which I referred to earlier. The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.

This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.
Of course, socialism does not end the chaos caused by the destruction of the price system. It perpetuates it. And if it is introduced without the prior existence of price controls, its effect is to inaugurate that very chaos. This is because socialism is not actually a positive economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism and its price system. As such, the essential nature of socialism is one and the same as the economic chaos resulting from the destruction of the price system by price and wage controls. (I want to point out that Bolshevik-style socialism’s imposition of a system of production quotas, with incentives everywhere to exceed the quotas, is a sure formula for universal shortages, just as exist under all around price and wage controls.)
At most, socialism merely changes the direction of the chaos. The government’s control over production may make possible a greater production of some goods of special importance to itself, but it does so only at the expense of wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the economic system. This is because the government has no way of knowing the effects on the rest of the economic system of its securing the production of the goods to which it attaches special
importance.

The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism â€” most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well.

We can start with the fact that the financial self-interest of sellers operating under price controls is to evade the price controls and raise their prices. Buyers otherwise unable to obtain goods are willing, indeed, eager to pay these higher prices as the means of securing the goods they want. In these circumstances, what is to stop prices from rising and a massive black market from developing?

The answer is a combination of severe penalties combined with a great likelihood of being caught and then actually suffering those penalties. Mere fines are not likely to provide much of a deterrent. They will be regarded simply as an additional business expense. If the government is serious about its price controls, it is necessary for it to impose penalties comparable to those for a major felony.

But the mere existence of such penalties is not enough. The government has to make it actually dangerous to conduct black-market transactions. It has to make people fear that in conducting such a transaction they might somehow be discovered by the police, and actually end up in jail. In order to create such fear, the government must develop an army of spies and secret informers. For example, the government must make a storekeeper and his customer fearful that if they engage in a black-market transaction, some other customer in the store will report them.
Because of the privacy and secrecy in which many black-market transactions can be conducted, the government must also make anyone contemplating a black-market transaction fearful that the other party might turn out to be a police agent trying to entrap him. The government must make people fearful even of their long-time associates, even of their friends and relatives, lest even they turn out to be informers.

And, finally, in order to obtain convictions, the government must place the decision about innocence or guilt in the case of black-market transactions in the hands of an administrative tribunal or its police agents on the spot. It cannot rely on jury trials, because it is unlikely that many juries can be found willing to bring in guilty verdicts in cases in which a man might have to go to jail for several years for the crime of selling a few pounds of meat or a pair of shoes above the ceiling price.

In sum, therefore, the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of “economic crimes,” in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

Clearly, the enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people. If the government is unwilling to go to such lengths, then, to that extent, its price controls prove unenforceable and simply break down. The black market then assumes major proportions. (Incidentally, none of this is to suggest that price controls were the cause of the reign of terror instituted by the Nazis. The Nazis began their reign of terror well before the enactment of price controls. As a result, they enacted price controls in an environment ready made for their enforcement.)

Black market activity entails the commission of further crimes. Under de facto socialism, the production and sale of goods in the black market entails the defiance of the government’s regulations concerning production and distribution, as well as the defiance of its price controls. For example, the goods themselves that are sold in the black market are intended by the government to be distributed in accordance with its plan, and not in the black market. The factors of production used to produce those goods are likewise intended by the government to be used in accordance with its plan, and not for the purpose of supplying the black market.

Under a system of de jure socialism, such as existed in Soviet Russia, in which the legal code of the country openly and explicitly makes the government the owner of the means of production, all black-market activity necessarily entails the misappropriation or theft of state property. For example, the factory workers or managers in Soviet Russia who turned out products that they sold in the black market were considered as stealing the raw materials supplied by the state.

Furthermore, in any type of socialist state, Nazi or Communist, the government’s economic plan is part of the supreme law of the land. We all have a good idea of how chaotic the so-called planning process of socialism is. Its further disruption by workers and managers siphoning off materials and supplies to produce for the black market, is something which a socialist state is logically entitled to regard as an act of sabotage of its national economic plan. And sabotage is how the legal code of a socialist state does regard it. Consistent with this fact, black-market activity in a socialist country often carries the death penalty.

Now I think that a fundamental fact that explains the all-round reign of terror found under socialism is the incredible dilemma in which a socialist state places itself in relation to the masses of its citizens. On the one hand, it assumes full responsibility for the individual’s economic well-being. Russian or Bolshevik-style socialism openly avows this responsibility â€” this is the main source of its popular appeal. On the other hand, in all of the ways one can imagine, a socialist state makes an unbelievable botch of the job. It makes the individual’s life a nightmare.

Every day of his life, the citizen of a socialist state must spend time in endless waiting lines. For him, the problems Americans experienced in the gasoline shortages of the 1970s are normal; only he does not experience them in relation to gasoline â€” for he does not own a car and has no hope of ever owning one â€” but in relation to simple items of clothing, to vegetables, even to bread. Even worse he is frequently forced to work at a job that is not of his choice and which he therefore must certainly hate. (For under shortages, the government comes to decide the allocation of labor just as it does the allocation of the material factors of production.) And he lives in a condition of unbelievable overcrowding, with hardly ever a chance for privacy. (In the face of housing shortages, boarders are assigned to homes; families are compelled to share apartments. And a system of internal passports and visas is adopted to limit the severity of housing shortages in the more desirable areas of the country.) To put it mildly, a person forced to live in such conditions must seethe with resentment and hostility.

Now against whom would it be more logical for the citizens of a socialist state to direct their resentment and hostility than against that very socialist state itself? The same socialist state which has proclaimed its responsibility for their life, has promised them a life of bliss, and which in fact is responsible for giving them a life of hell. Indeed, the leaders of a socialist state live in a further dilemma, in that they daily encourage the people to believe that socialism is a perfect system whose bad results can only be the work of evil men. If that were true, who in reason could those evil men be but the rulers themselves, who have not only made life a hell, but have perverted an allegedly perfect system to do it?

It follows that the rulers of a socialist state must live in terror of the people. By the logic of their actions and their teachings, the boiling, seething resentment of the people should well up and swallow them in an orgy of bloody vengeance. The rulers sense this, even if they do not admit it openly; and thus their major concern is always to keep the lid on the citizenry.

Consequently, it is true but very inadequate merely to say such things as that socialism lacks freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Of course, it lacks these freedoms. If the government owns all the newspapers and publishing houses, if it decides for what purposes newsprint and paper are to be made available, then obviously nothing can be printed which the government does not want printed. If it owns all the meeting halls, no public speech or lecture can be delivered which the government does not want delivered. But socialism goes far beyond the mere lack of freedom of press and speech.

A socialist government totally annihilates these freedoms. It turns the press and every public forum into a vehicle of hysterical propaganda in its own behalf, and it engages in the relentless persecution of everyone who dares to deviate by so much as an inch from its official party line.

The reason for these facts is the socialist rulers’ terror of the people. To protect themselves, they must order the propaganda ministry and the secret police to work ’round the clock. The one, to constantly divert the people’s attention from the responsibility of socialism, and of the rulers of socialism, for the people’s misery. The other, to spirit away and silence anyone who might even remotely suggest the responsibility of socialism or its rulers â€” to spirit away anyone who begins to show signs of thinking for himself. It is because of the rulers’ terror, and their desperate need to find scapegoats for the failures of socialism, that the press of a socialist country is always full of stories about foreign plots and sabotage, and about corruption and mismanagement on the part of subordinate officials, and why, periodically, it is necessary to unmask large-scale domestic plots and to sacrifice major officials and entire factions in giant purges.

It is because of their terror, and their desperate need to crush every breath even of potential opposition, that the rulers of socialism do not dare to allow even purely cultural activities that are not under the control of the state. For if people so much as assemble for an art show or poetry reading that is not controlled by the state, the rulers must fear the dissemination of dangerous ideas. Any unauthorized ideas are dangerous ideas, because they can lead people to begin thinking for themselves and thus to begin thinking about the nature of socialism and its rulers. The rulers must fear the spontaneous assembly of a handful of people in a room, and use the secret police and its apparatus of spies, informers, and terror either to stop such meetings or to make sure that their content is entirely innocuous from the point of view of the state.

Socialism cannot be ruled for very long except by terror. As soon as the terror is relaxed, resentment and hostility logically begin to well up against the rulers. The stage is thus set for a revolution or civil war. In fact, in the absence of terror, or, more correctly, a sufficient degree of terror, socialism would be characterized by an endless series of revolutions and civil wars, as each new group of rulers proved as incapable of making socialism function successfully as its predecessors before it. The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system. Stalin could come to the fore because his unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power. He rose to the top by a process of socialist natural selection: the selection of the worst.
I need to anticipate a possible misunderstanding concerning my thesis that socialism is totalitarian by its nature. This concerns the allegedly socialist countries run by Social Democrats, such as Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, which are clearly not totalitarian dictatorships.

In such cases, it is necessary to realize that along with these countries not being totalitarian, they are also not socialist. Their governing parties may espouse socialism as their philosophy and their ultimate goal, but socialism is not what they have implemented as their economic system. Their actual economic system is that of a hampered market economy, as Mises termed it. While more hampered than our own in important respects, their economic system is essentially similar to our own, in that the characteristic driving force of production and economic activity is not government decree but the initiative of private owners motivated by the prospect of private profit.
The reason that Social Democrats do not establish socialism when they come to power, is that they are unwilling to do what would be required. The establishment of socialism as an economic system requires a massive act of theft â€” the means of production must be seized from their owners and turned over to the state. Such seizure is virtually certain to provoke substantial resistance on the part of the owners, resistance which can be overcome only by use of massive force.

The Communists were and are willing to apply such force, as evidenced in Soviet Russia. Their character is that of armed robbers prepared to commit murder if that is what is necessary to carry out their robbery. The character of the Social Democrats in contrast is more like that of pickpockets, who may talk of pulling the big job someday, but who in fact are unwilling to do the killing that would be required, and so give up at the slightest sign of serious resistance.

As for the Nazis, they generally did not have to kill in order to seize the property of Germans other than Jews. This was because, as we have seen, they established socialism by stealth, through price controls, which served to maintain the outward guise and appearance of private ownership. The private owners were thus deprived of their property without knowing it and thus felt no need to defend it by force.
I think I have shown that socialism â€” actual socialism â€” is totalitarian by its very nature.

UC, now that you’ve finally given a big glob of citations, what does it mean?

You have established that the nazis got a lot of control of their economy, just as the communists did in russia.

And you have established that Hitler sometimes used rhetoric that was some ways similar to socialist rhetoric — he talked about the same claimed injustices and he talked about not tolerating them.

However, what you have not established is whether either the nazi system or the communist systems were actually socialist. Many socialists claim that neither were. Both of them used rhetoric of various sorts — sometimes the same rhetoric — to get power. And neither of them kept their socialist promises.

They used up the economic power they concentrated to build military-industrial juggernauts, just as we did as a capitalist society.

As you point out, we don’t have an agreed definition of socialism.

So why would we argue which systems were socialist? What good does it do us?

I would take the word of any Von Mises Institute lecturer on socialism in precisely the spirit I’d take a ’60s Soviet official lecture on capitalism, the Discovery Institute on the motives of evolutionary biologists, and the like.

Hartmut

Posted May 14, 2007 at 6:13 am

The nationalisation (or threat thereof) of key industries (esp. related to the ability to fight wars) is not limited to “left-wing” systems but can also be found in the party programs of unmistakbly right-wing movements. The deification of the state and marginalization of the individual is a standard for most authoritarian philosophies on both the left and the right. The term “the people” is more often than not just a euphemism for the state (and its rulers).
It is as meaningless as “the American people” (or “Christians”) as used by US political (resp. religious) fringers.

urban coyote

Posted May 16, 2007 at 6:26 pm

To Hartmut:

It’s important to know when an argument is fallacious, when a label has been intentionally changed. This is especially true when the label is “socialism” attempting to redefine itself as something much more benign than it is.

European Marxists changed the definition of socialism after 1945 to repudiate Hitler. But Hitler’s party and Hitler’s reign was regarded as mainstream socialism until the Red Army was in Berlin.

Anarch’s argument is based on a “cunning” (to use Christopher Hitchens’ book title) revisionist history. Hitler was not outside mainstream socialism while he was in power — he ALONE got and obtained power both by thugs and by democracy, single-handedly satisfying the conditions that tore socialists into factions after the Vienna fiasco of 1927.

That Hitler was a mainstream socialist is supported by center-left (Hitchens), center (Wolfe) and center-right (von Mises and Reisman) citings of mine. Only the Hard Left itself insists on excluding Hitler.

This is vital because it displays the fallacy of Anarch’s argument, and, much more importantly, because socialism concentrates so much power in its government by its ideology that dictatorship is virtually inevitable (the lecture posting).

And you need to know it when you see it, not as its proponents have redefined it — because — it redefines human rightlessness.

Socialism doesn’t just lead to prison time for non-adherents. It can lead to a brutal nightmare society where only tattlers have status, a miserable nightmare worse than Kafka wrote about. An example of this is Cuba (read Armando Valladeres “Against All Hope” book to check this out).

And we need to remain clear-eyed and unconned about this. Hitler was a socialist, even his “retention” of private property for shopkeepers was a sham that was de facto socialism (says von Mises, who left Vienna hours before he would have been arrested by the Gestapo).

We need to know when political blarney can lead to tyranny. Without any filters. And without buying self-serving re-definitions.

Hitler was a socialist. And a nationalist. And an honestly electred democrat. And a prince of thugs And a psychopath. It doesn’t help to fuzz up the titles or to redefine an ideology for post propter hoc salesmanship of an inherently dictatorial idea.

That’s why I put all those citations in. Plus citations have magically killed off the ad hominem attacks on me, a kindly, sensitive and artistic individual as I am.

[end of thread]

NOTE: This is the second half of this thread, which started by dealing with Rudolf Guiliani and then meandered through an argument I made about how Thatcher and Reagan won the Cold War. As soon as I mentioned Hitler, though, the Mind War began in earnest and the beginning of that sub-thread is the beginning of this entry.